He became very early a declaimer.  Having learned the ballad of Hardy Knute, he shouted it forth with such pertinacious enthusiasm that the clergyman of his grandfather’s parish complained that he “might as well speak in a cannon’s mouth as where that child was.”  At six years of age Mrs. Cockburn described him as the most astounding genius of a boy, she ever saw.  “He was reading a poem to his mother when I went in.  I made him read on:  it was the description of a shipwreck.  His passion rose with the storm.  ‘There’s the mast gone,’ says he; ’crash it goes; they will all perish.’  After his agitation he turns to me, ’That is too melancholy,’ says he; ‘I had better read you something more amusing.’” And after the call, he told his aunt he liked Mrs. Cockburn, for “she was a virtuoso like himself.”  “Dear Walter,” says Aunt Jenny, “what is a virtuoso?” “Don’t ye know?  Why, it’s one who wishes and will know everything.”  This last scene took place in his father’s house in Edinburgh; but Scott’s life at Sandy-Knowe, including even the old minister, Dr. Duncan, who so bitterly complained of the boy’s ballad-spouting, is painted for us, as everybody knows, in the picture of his infancy given in the introduction to the third canto of Marmion:—­

    “It was a barren scene and wild,
    Where naked cliffs were rudely piled: 
    But ever and anon between
    Lay velvet tufts of loveliest green;
    And well the lonely infant knew
    Recesses where the wall-flower grew,
    And honeysuckle loved to crawl
    Up the low crag and ruin’d wall. 
    I deem’d such nooks the sweetest shade
    The sun in all its round survey’d;
    And still I thought that shatter’d tower
    The mightiest work of human power;
    And marvell’d as the aged hind
    With some strange tale bewitch’d my mind,
    Of forayers, who, with headlong force,
    Down from that strength had spurr’d their horse,
    Their southern rapine to renew,
    Far in the distant Cheviots blue,
    And, home returning, fill’d the hall
    With revel, wassail-rout, and brawl. 
    Methought that still with trump and clang
    The gateway’s broken arches rang;
    Methought grim features, seam’d with scars,
    Glared through the window’s rusty bars;
    And ever, by the winter hearth,
    Old tales I heard of woe or mirth,
    Of lovers’ slights, of ladies’ charms,
    Of witches’ spells, of warriors’ arms,
    Of patriot battles, won of old
    By Wallace wight and Bruce the bold;
    Of later fields of feud and fight,
    When, pouring from their Highland height,
    The Scottish clans, in headlong sway,
    Had swept the scarlet ranks away. 
    While, stretch’d at length upon the floor,
    Again I fought each combat o’er,
    Pebbles and shells in order laid,
    The mimic ranks of war display’d;
    And onward still the Scottish