lion bore,
    And still the scattered Southron fled before. 
    Still, with vain fondness, could I trace
    Anew each kind familiar face
    That brighten’d at our evening fire! 
    From the thatch’d mansion’s grey-hair’d sire,
    Wise without learning, plain and good,
    And sprung of Scotland’s gentler blood;
    Whose eye in age, quick, clear, and keen,
    Show’d what in youth its glance had been;
    Whose doom discording neighbours sought,
    Content with equity unbought;
    To him the venerable priest,
    Our frequent and familiar guest,
    Whose life and manners well could paint
    Alike the student and the saint;
    Alas! whose speech too oft I broke
    With gambol rude and timeless joke;
    For I was wayward, bold, and wild,
    A self-will’d imp, a grandame’s child;
    But, half a plague and half a jest,
    Was still endured, beloved, caress’d.”

A picture this of a child of great spirit, though with that spirit was combined an active and subduing sweetness which could often conquer, as by a sudden spell, those whom the boy loved.  Towards those, however, whom he did not love he could be vindictive.  His relative, the laird of Raeburn, on one occasion wrung the neck of a pet starling, which the child had partly tamed.  “I flew at his throat like a wild-cat,” he said, in recalling the circumstance, fifty years later, in his journal on occasion of the old laird’s death; “and was torn from him with no little difficulty.”  And, judging from this journal, I doubt whether he had ever really forgiven the laird of Raeburn.  Towards those whom he loved but had offended, his manner was very different.  “I seldom,” said one of his tutors, Mr. Mitchell, “had occasion all the time I was in the family to find fault with him, even for trifles, and only once to threaten serious castigation, of which he was no sooner aware, than he suddenly sprang up, threw his arms about my neck and kissed me.”  And the quaint old gentleman adds this commentary:—­“By such generous and noble conduct my displeasure was in a moment converted into esteem and admiration; my soul melted into tenderness, and I was ready to mingle my tears with his.”  This spontaneous and fascinating sweetness of his childhood was naturally overshadowed to some extent in later life by Scott’s masculine and proud character, but it was always in him.  And there was much of true character in the child behind this sweetness.  He had wonderful self-command, and a peremptory kind of good sense, even in his infancy.  While yet a child under six years of age, hearing one of the servants beginning to tell a ghost-story to another, and well knowing that if he listened, it would scare away his night’s rest, he acted for himself with all the promptness of an elder person acting for him, and, in spite of the fascination of the subject, resolutely muffled his head in the bed-clothes and refused to hear the tale.  His sagacity in