meant, in its chief features, to represent his father.  To this Sir Walter adds, in one of his later journals, the trait that his father was a man of fine presence, who conducted all conventional arrangements with a certain grandeur and dignity of air, and “absolutely loved a funeral.”  “He seemed to preserve the list of a whole bead-roll of cousins merely for the pleasure of being at their funerals, which he was often asked to superintend, and I suspect had sometimes to pay for.  He carried me with him as often as he could to these mortuary ceremonies; but feeling I was not, like him, either useful or ornamental, I escaped as often as I could.”  This strong dash of the conventional in Scott’s father, this satisfaction in seeing people fairly to the door of life, and taking his final leave of them there, with something of a ceremonious flourish of observance, was, however, combined with a much nobler and deeper kind of orderliness.  Sir Walter used to say that his father had lost no small part of a very flourishing business, by insisting that his clients should do their duty to their own people better than they were themselves at all inclined to do it.  And of this generous strictness in sacrificing his own interests to his sympathy for others, the son had as much as the father.

Sir Walter’s mother, who was a Miss Rutherford, the daughter of a physician, had been better educated than most Scotchwomen of her day, in spite of having been sent “to be finished off” by “the honourable Mrs. Ogilvie,” whose training was so effective, in one direction at least, that even in her eightieth year Mrs. Scott could not enjoy a comfortable rest in her chair, but “took as much care to avoid touching her chair with her back, as if she had still been under the stern eyes of Mrs. Ogilvie.”  None the less Mrs. Scott was a motherly, comfortable woman, with much tenderness of heart, and a well-stored, vivid memory.  Sir Walter, writing of her, after his mother’s death, to Lady Louisa Stewart, says, “She had a mind peculiarly well stored with much acquired information and natural talent, and as she was very old, and had an excellent memory, she could draw, without the least exaggeration or affectation, the most striking pictures of the past age.  If I have been able to do anything in the way of painting the past times, it is very much from the studies with which she presented me.  She connected a long period of time with the present generation, for she remembered, and had often spoken with, a person who perfectly recollected the battle of Dunbar and Oliver Cromwell’s subsequent entry into Edinburgh.”  On the day before the stroke of paralysis which carried her off, she had told Mr. and Mrs. Scott of Harden, “with great accuracy, the real story of the Bride of Lammermuir, and pointed out wherein it differed from the novel.  She had all the names of the parties, and pointed out (for she was a great genealogist) their connexion with existing families."[1] Sir Walter records many evidences