"She had received, as became the daughter of an eminently learned
physician, the best sort of education then bestowed on young
gentlewomen in Scotland." The poet, speaking of Mrs. Euphemia
Sinclair, the mistress of the school at which his mother was reared,
to the ingenious local antiquary, Mr. Robert Chambers, said that
"she must have been possessed of uncommon talents for education, as
all her young ladies were, in after-life, fond of reading, wrote and
spelled admirably, were well acquainted with history and the belles
lettres, without neglecting the more homely duties of the needle and
accompt-book, and perfectly well-bred in society." Mr. Chambers adds,
"Sir Walter further communicated that his mother, and many others of
Mrs. Sinclair's pupils, were sent afterwards to be finished off by
the Honourable Mrs. Ogilvie, a lady who trained her young friends to a
style of manners which would now be considered intolerably stiff. Such
was the effect of this early training upon the mind of Mrs. Scott,
that even when she approached her eightieth year, she took as much
care to avoid touching her chair with her back, as if she had still
been under the stern eye of Mrs. Ogilvie."
You are to note in this extract three things. First, the singular
influence of education, given by a master or mistress of real
power. "All her young ladies" (all, Sir Walter! do you verily mean
this?) "fond of reading," and so forth.
Well, I believe that, with slight exception, Sir Walter did mean it. He
seldom wrote, or spoke, in careless generalization. And I doubt not
that it is truly possible, by first insisting on a girl's really
knowing how to read, and then by allowing her very few books, and
those absolutely wholesome,--and not amusing!--to give her a healthy
appetite for reading. Spelling, I had thought was impossible to many
girls; but perhaps this is only because it is not early enough made
a point of: it cannot be learned late.
Secondly: I wish Mr. Chambers had given us Sir Walter's words, instead
of only the substance of what he "further communicated." But you may
safely gather what I want you to notice, that Sir Walter attributes
the essentials of good breeding to the first careful and scholarly
mistress; and only the formality, which he somewhat hesitatingly
approves, to the finishing hand of Mrs. Ogilvie. He would have paid
less regard to the opinion of modern society on such matters, had he
lived to see our languid Paradise of sofas and rocking-chairs. The
beginning, and very nearly the end, of bodily education for a girl,
is to make sure that she can stand, and sit, upright; the ankle
vertical, and firm as a marble shaft; the waist elastic as a reed,
and as unfatiguable. I have seen my own mother travel from sunrise to
sunset, in a summer's day, without once leaning back in the carriage.
Thirdly: The respectability belonging in those days to the profession
of a schoolmistress. In fact, I do not myself think that any old lady
can be respectable, unless she is one, whether she be paid for her
pupils or not. And to deserve to be one, makes her Honourable at once,
titled or untitled.
This much comes, then, of the instructions of Mrs. Sinclair and
Mrs. Ogilvie; and why should not all your daughters be educated by
Honourable Mrs. Ogilvies, and learn to spell, and to sit upright? Then
they will all have sons like Sir Walter Scott, you think?
Not so, good friends. Miss Rutherford had not wholly learned to
sit upright from Mrs. Ogilvie. She had some disposition of her own
in that kind, different from the other pupils, and taught in older
schools. Look at the lines in the Lay, where Conrad of Wolfenstein,
"In humour highly crossed
About some steeds his band had lost,
High words to words succeeding still,
Smote with his gauntlet stout Hunthill;
A hot and hardy Rutherford,
Whom men call Dickon Draw-the-Sword.
Stern Rutherford right little said,
But bit his glove, and shook his head.--
A fortnight thence, in Inglewood,
Stout Conrad, cold and drenched in blood,
His bosom gored with many a wound,
Was by a woodman's lyme-dog [78] found;
Unknown the manner of his death,
Gone was his brand, both sword and sheath;
But ever from that time, 'twas said
That Dickon wore a Cologne blade."
Such the race,--such the school education,--of Scott's mother. Of her
home education, you may judge by what she herself said of her father
to her son's tutor (whose exquisitely grotesque letter, for the rest,
vol. i., p. 108,) is alone enough to explain Scott's inevitable future
perception of the weakness of religious egotism.
"Mrs. Scott told me that, when prescribing for his patients, it was
Dr. Rutherford's custom to offer up, at the same time, a prayer for
the accompanying blessing of heaven,--a laudable practice, in which,
I fear, he has not been generally imitated by those of his profession."
A very laudable practice indeed, good Mr. Mitchell; perhaps even a
useful and practically efficacious one, on occasion; at all events
one of the last remains of noble Puritanism, in its sincerity, among
men of sound learning.
For Dr. Rutherford was also an excellent linguist, and, according to
the custom of the times, delivered his prelections to the students in
Latin, (like the conversation in Beardie's Jacobite Club). Nowadays,
you mean to have no more Latin talked, as I understand; nor prayers
said. Pills--Morison's and others--can be made up on cheaper terms,
you think,--and be equally salutary?
Be it so. In these ancient manners, however, Scott's mother is brought
up, and consistently abides; doubtless, having some reverence for
the Latin tongue, and much faith in the medicine of prayer;--having
had troubles about her soul's safety also; perhaps too solicitous,
at one time, on that point; but being sure she has a soul to be
solicitous about, which is much; obedient herself to the severest
laws of morality and life; mildly and steadily enforcing them on her
children; but naturally of light and happy temper, and with a strong
turn to study poetry and works of imagination.
I do not say anything of his father till we come to the
apprenticeship,--except only that he was no less devout than
his mother, and more formal. Of training which could be known
or remembered, neither he nor the mother give any to their boy
until after the Sandy-Knowe time. But how of the unremembered
training? When do you suppose the education of a child begins? At
six months old it can answer smile with smile, and impatience with
impatience. It can observe, enjoy, and suffer, acutely, and, in a
measure, intelligently. Do you suppose it makes no difference to
it that the order of the house is perfect and quiet, the faces of
its father and mother full of peace, their soft voices familiar to
its ear, and even those of strangers, loving; or that it is tossed
from arm to arm, among hard, or reckless, or vain-minded persons, in
the gloom of a vicious household, or the confusion of a gay one? The
moral disposition is, I doubt not, greatly determined in those first
speechless years. I believe especially that quiet, and the withdrawal
of objects likely to distract, by amusing the child, so as to let it
fix its attention undisturbed on every visible least thing in its
domain, is essential to the formation of some of the best powers
of thought. It is chiefly to this quietude of his own home that I
ascribe the intense perceptiveness and memory of the three-years'-old
child at Sandy-Knowe; for, observe, it is in that first year he learns
his Hardiknute; by his aunt's help he learns to read at Bath, and can
cater for himself on his return. Of this aunt, and her mother, we must
now know what we can. You notice the difference which Scott himself
indicates between the two: "My grandmother, who was meekness itself,
and my aunt, who was of a higher temper." Yet his grandmother, Barbara
Haliburton, was descended from the so-called, in speciality of honour,
'Standard-bearer' of the Douglases; and Dryburgh Abbey was part of
her family's estate, they having been true servants to the monks of
it, once on a time. Here is a curious little piece of lecture on the
duties of master and servant,--Royal Proclamation on the 8th of May,
1535, by James the Fifth: [79] "Whereas we, having been advised,
and knowing the said gentlemen, the Halliburtons, to be leal and
true honest men, long servants unto the saide abbeye, for the saide
landis, stout men at armes, and goode borderers against Ingland; and
doe therefore decree and ordaine, that they shall be re-possess'd, and
bruik and enjoy the landis and steedings they had of the said abbeye,
paying the use and wonte: and that they sall be goode servants to
the said venerabil father, like as they and their predecessours were
to the said venerabil father, and his predecessours, and he a good
master to them." The Abbot of Dryburgh, however, and others in such
high places, having thus misread their orders, and taken on themselves
to be masters instead of ministers, the Reformation took its course;
and Dryburgh claims allegiance no more--but to its dead.
You notice the phrase, "good borderers against England." Lest I
should have to put it off, too long, I may as well, in this place,
let you know the origin of the tune which Scott's uncle was so fond
of. From the letter of one of his friends to Dr. Brown I gratefully
take the following passage:--
"In the fourteenth century some English riders were slaking their
thirst on the banks of the Tweed, nearly opposite Cartley Hole,--now
Abbotsford,--where wild plums grew. The borderers came down upon them
unexpectedly, and annihilated them, driving some into the Tweed,
at a place called the Englishman's Dyke. The borderers accordingly
thought their surprise sourer fruit to the invaders than the plums
they went to pluck, and christened themselves by the soubriquet of
'Sour Plums in Galashiels,' which gave a text for the song and tune,
and a motto for the arms of the town of Galashiels."
There is something to think of for you, when next you see the
blackthorn blow, or the azure bloom spread on its bossed clusters of
fruit. I cannot find any of the words of the song; but one beautiful
stanza of the ballad of Cospatrick may at least serve to remind you
of the beauty of the Border in its summer time:--
"For to the greenwood I maun gae
To pu' the red rose and the slae,
To pu' the red rose and the thyme,
To deck my mother's bour and mine."
"Meekness itself," and yet possibly with some pride in her also, this
Barbara, with the ruins of her Dryburgh still seen grey above the
woods, from the tower at whose foot her grandchild was playing. So
short the space he had to travel, when his lameness should be
cured,--the end of all travel already in sight!
Some pride in her, perhaps: you need not be surprised her grandchild
should have a little left.
"Many a tale" (she told him) "of Watt of Harden, Wight Willie of
Aikwood (Oakwood), Jamie Tellfer of the fair Dodhead, and other
heroes--merry men, all of the persuasion and calling of Robin
Hood and Little John. A more recent hero, but not of less note,
was the celebrated De'il of Little Dean, whom she well remembered,
as he had married her mother's sister. Of this extraordinary person
I learned many a story--grave and gay, comic and warlike"--(dearest,
meek, grandmamma!)
"Two or three old books which lay in the window-seat were explored for
my amusement in the tedious winter days. Automathes [80] and Ramsay's
Tea-table Miscellany were my favourites, although, at a later period,
an odd volume of Josephus's Wars of the Jews divided my partiality."
"Two or three old books in the window-seat," and "an odd volume of
Josephus." How entertaining our farm library! (with the Bible, you
observe;) and think how much matters have changed for the better:
your package down from Mudie's monthly, with all the new magazines,
and a dozen of novels; Good Words--as many as you choose,--and
Professor Tyndall's last views on the subject of the Regelation of
Ice. (Respecting which, for the sake of Scott's first love, and
for the sake also of my own first love--which was of snow, even
more than water,--I have a few words to say to Professor Tyndall,
but they must be for next month, as they will bitterly interrupt our
sentimental proceedings.)
Nay--with your professional information that when ice breaks you
can stick it together again, you have also imaginative literature of
the rarest. Here--instead of Ramsay's Tea-table Miscellany, with its
Hardiknute and other ballads of softer tendency,--some of them not the
best of their kind, I admit,--here you have Mr. Knatchbull-Huguessen,
M.P.'s, Tales at Tea-time, [81] dedicated to the schoolroom teapot,
in which the first story is of the "Pea Green Nose," and in which
(opening at random) I find it related of some Mary of our modern
St. Mary's Lochs, that "Mary stepped forward hastily, when one of
the lobsters sprang forward, and seized her arm in his claw, saying,
in a low, agitated tone of voice," etc. etc.
You were better off, little as you think it, with that poor library
on the window-seat. Your own, at worst, though much fingered and
torn;--your own mentally, still more utterly; and though the volume
be odd, do you think that, by any quantity of reading, you can make
your knowledge of history, even?
You are so proud of having learned to read too, and I warrant you
could not read so much as Barbara Haliburton's shield: Or, on a bend
azure, three mascles of the first; in the second quarter a buckle of
the second. I meant to have engraved it, but shall never get on to
aunt Jessie at this rate.
"My kind and affectionate aunt, Miss Janet Scott, whose memory will
ever be dear to me, used to read these works to me, with admirable
patience, until I could repeat long passages by heart."
Why admirable, Sir Walter? Surely she might have spent her time more
usefully--lucratively at least--than in this manner of 'nursing the
baby.' Might you not have been safely left, to hunt up Hardiknute,
in maturer years, for yourself?
By no manner of means, Sir Walter thinks; and justly. With all his
gifts, but for this aunt Janet,--for his mother,--and for Lilias
Redgauntlet,--he had assuredly been only a hunting laird, and the
best story-teller in the Lothians.
We scarcely ever, in our study of education, ask this most essential
of all questions about a man, What patience had his mother or sister
with him?
And most men are apt to forget it themselves. Pardon me for speaking of
myself for a moment; (if I did not know things by my own part in them,
I would not write of them at all). You know that people sometimes call
me a good writer: others like to hear me speak. I seldom mis-spell
or mis-pronounce a word, grossly; and can generally say what I want
to say. Well, my own impression about this power, such as it may be,
is that it was born with me, or gradually gained by my own study. It
is only by deliberate effort that I recall the long morning hours
of toil, as regular as sunrise,--toil on both sides equal,--by
which, year after year, my mother forced me to learn all the Scotch
paraphrases by heart, and ever so many chapters of the Bible besides,
(the eighth of 1st Kings being one,--try it, good reader, in a leisure
hour!) allowing not so much as a syllable to be missed or misplaced;
while every sentence was required to be said over and over again till
she was satisfied with the accent of it. I recollect a struggle between
us of about three weeks, concerning the accent of the "of" in the lines
"Shall any following spring revive
The ashes of the urn?"
I insisting, partly in childish obstinacy, and partly in true instinct
for rhythm (being wholly careless on the subject both of urns and
their contents), on reciting it, "The ashes of the urn." It was not,
I say, till after three weeks' labour, that my mother got the accent
laid upon the ashes, to her mind. But had it taken three years, she
would have done it, having once undertaken to do it. And, assuredly,
had she not done it, I had been simply an avaricious picture collector,
or perhaps even a more avaricious money collector, to this day; and
had she done it wrongly, no after-study would ever have enabled me
to read so much as a single line of verse.
It is impossible, either in history or biography, to arrange what
one wants to insist upon wholly by time, or wholly by rational
connection. You must observe that the visit to England, of which
I am now going to speak, interrupts, with a brilliant display of
pyrotechnic light, the steady burning of the stars above Scott's
childhood. From the teaching of his aunt, before he could read, I
should like, for several reasons, to go on at once to the teaching
of his mother, after he could read; but I must content myself, for
the moment, with adding the catalogue of mamma's library to that of
aunt Jessie's. On the window-seat of Sandy-Knowe--only to be got at
the pith of by help of auntie--we had the odd volume of Josephus,
Automathes, and two or three old books not named. A year later, mamma
provides for us--now scholars ourselves--Pope's Homer, Allan Ramsay's
Evergreen, and, for Sundays, Bunyan, Gesner's Death of Abel, and Rowe's
(Mrs.) Letters from the Other World. But we have made our grand tour
in the meantime, and have some new ideas of this world in our head;
of which the reader must now consider.
"I was in my fourth year when my father was advised that the Bath
waters might be of some advantage to my lameness. My affectionate
aunt--although such a journey promised to a person of her retired
habits anything but pleasure or amusement--undertook as readily to
accompany me to the wells of Bladud, as if she had expected all the
delight that ever the prospect of a watering-place held out to its
most impatient visitants."
And why should she not? Does it not seem somewhat strange to you,
from what you know of young, or even middle-aged, aunt Jessies of
the present day, that Miss Scott should look upon the journey to Bath
as so severe a piece of self-denial; and that her nephew regards her
doing so as a matter of course?
How old was aunt Jessie, think you? Scott's father, the eldest of
a large family, was born in 1729,--in this year, therefore, was
forty-six. If we uncharitably suppose Miss Jessie the next oldest,
she would be precisely of the age of Mrs. Tabitha Bramble; and one
could fancy her, it seems to me, on the occasion of this unforeseen
trip to the most fashionable watering-place in England, putting up
her "rose-collard neglegay with green robins, and her bloo quilted
petticot," without feeling herself in the position of a martyr led
to the stake. But aunt Jessie must really have been much younger than
Mrs. Tabitha, and have had the advantage of her in other particulars
besides spelling. She was afterwards married, and when Lockhart saw her
(1820?)--forty years or so after this--had still "the softest eye and
the sweetest voice." And from the thatched mansion of the moorland,
Miss Jessie feels it so irksome and solemn a duty--does she?--to go to
"the squares, the circus, and the parades, which put you" (Miss Lydia
Melford) "in mind of the sumptuous palaces represented in prints and
pictures; and the new buildings, such as Prince's Row, Harlequin's
Row, Bladud's Row, and twenty other rows besides,"--not to speak of
a real pump in a pump-room, with a handle to it, and other machinery,
instead of the unpumped Tweed!
Her nephew, however, judges her rightly. Aunt Jessie could give him
no truer proof of faithful affection than in the serenity with which
she resolves to take him to this centre of gaiety.
Whereupon, you are to note this, that the end of all right education
for a woman is to make her love her home better than any other place;
that she should as seldom leave it as a queen her queendom; nor ever
feel entirely at rest but within its threshold.
For her boy, however, there are things to be seen in Bath, and to be
learned. "I acquired the rudiments of reading from an old dame near
our lodgings, and I had never a more regular teacher, though I think
I did not attend her more than a quarter of a year. An occasional
lesson from my aunt supplied the rest." Yes, little Walter. If we
indeed have a mind to our book, that is all the teaching we want;
we shall perhaps get through a volume or two in time.
"The circumstances I recollect of my residence in Bath are but
trifling; yet I never recall them without a feeling of pleasure. The
beauties of the Parade (which of them I know not), with the river Avon
winding around it, and the lowing of the cattle from the opposite
hills, are warm in my recollection, and are only rivalled by the
splendours of a toy-shop somewhere near the Orange Grove. I had
acquired, I know not by what means, a kind of superstitious terror for
statuary of all kinds. No ancient Iconoclast or modern Calvinist could
have looked on the outside of the Abbey Church (if I mistake not, the
principal church at Bath is so called,) with more horror than the image
of Jacob's Ladder, with all its angels, presented to my infant eye. My
uncle [82] effectually combated my terrors, and formally introduced
me to a statue of Neptune, which perhaps still keeps guard at the
side of the Avon, where a pleasure-boat crosses to Spring Gardens."
"A sweet retreat"--Spring Gardens (again I quote Miss Lydia)--"laid
out in walks, and ponds, and parterres of flowers, and hard by the
Pamprom is a coffee-house for the ladies, but my aunt says young girls
are not admitted, inasmuch as the conversation turns upon politics,
scandal, philosophy, and other subjects above our capacity." Is aunt
Janet old enough and clever enough for the company, I wonder? And
Walter--what toys did he mostly covet in the Orange Grove?
The passage about the effect of sculpture upon him is intensely
interesting to me, partly as an indication of the state of his own
nascent imagination, partly as illustrative of the power of religious
sculpture, meant to terrify, on the minds of peasant children of
high faculty. But I cannot dwell on this point here: I must get on
to his first sight of a play. The third Fors--still favourable to
him--appoints it to be "As you like it."
A never-to-be-forgotten delight, influencing him in his whole nature
thenceforward. It is uncle Robert's doing this, aunt Jessie having
been probably doubtful on the matter, but irresistibly coaxed. Uncle
Robert has much to answer for! How much, I can't tell you to-day;
nor for a while now, for I have other matters on hand in the next
Fors or two--Glacier theory, and on the road to it I must not let
you forget the broom-market between Berne and Thun; and I've got to
finish my notes on Friedrich and his father, who take more noticing
than I expected; besides that I've Friedrich II. of Germany to give
some account of; and all my Oxford work besides. I can only again and
again beg the many valued correspondents whose letters I must abruptly
answer, to remember that not one word on any of these subjects can be
set down without care; and to consider what the length of a day is,
under existing solar arrangements.
Meantime, here is a point for you to think of. The boy interrupts the
first scene of the play by crying aloud, "An't they brothers?"--(the
third Fors had appointed for him that one day he should refuse to
speak to his own;)--and long remembers the astonishment with which
he "looked upon the apathy of the elder part of our company, who,
having the means, did not spend every evening at the theatre."
How was it that he never could write a Play?