“This was the unhappy man who, after attending Prince Charles Stuart as his secretary throughout the greater part of his expedition, condescended to redeem his own life and fortune by bearing evidence against the noblest of his late master’s adherents, when—­

    “Pitied by gentle hearts, Kilmarnock died,
    The brave, Balmerino were on thy side."[3]

“Broughton’s saucer”—­i. e. the saucer belonging to the cup thus sacrificed by Mr. Scott to his indignation against one who had redeemed his own life and fortune by turning king’s evidence against one of Prince Charles Stuart’s adherents,—­was carefully preserved by his son, and hung up in his first study, or “den,” under a little print of Prince Charlie.  This anecdote brings before the mind very vividly the character of Sir Walter’s parents.  The eager curiosity of the active-minded woman, whom “the honourable Mrs. Ogilvie” had been able to keep upright in her chair for life, but not to cure of the desire to unravel the little mysteries of which she had a passing glimpse; the grave formality of the husband, fretting under his wife’s personal attention to a dishonoured man, and making her pay the penalty by dashing to pieces the cup which the king’s evidence had used,—­again, the visitor himself, perfectly conscious no doubt that the Hanoverian lawyer held him in utter scorn for his faithlessness and cowardice, and reluctant, nevertheless, to reject the courtesy of the wife, though he could not get anything but cold legal advice from the husband:—­all these are figures which must have acted on the youthful imagination of the poet with singular vivacity, and shaped themselves in a hundred changing turns of the historical kaleidoscope which was always before his mind’s eye, as he mused upon that past which he was to restore for us with almost more than its original freshness of life.  With such scenes touching even his own home, Scott must have been constantly taught to balance in his own mind, the more romantic, against the more sober and rational considerations, which had so recently divided house against house, even in the same family and clan.  That the stern Calvinistic lawyer should have retained so much of his grandfather Beardie’s respect for the adherents of the exiled house of Stuart, must in itself have struck the boy as even more remarkable than the passionate loyalty of the Stuarts’ professed partisans, and have lent a new sanction to the romantic drift of his mother’s old traditions, and one to which they must have been indebted for a great part of their fascination.

Walter Scott, the ninth of twelve children, of whom the first six died in early childhood, was born in Edinburgh, on the 15th of August, 1771.  Of the six later-born children, all but one were boys, and the one sister was a somewhat querulous invalid, whom he seems to have pitied almost more than he loved.  At the age of eighteen months the boy had a teething-fever, ending in a life-long lameness; and this was the reason