Mr. Cunningham relates some interesting particulars of this period.
Before Sir Walter was two years old, his nurse let him fall out of her
arms, so as to injure his right foot, and render him lame for life:
"This accident did not otherwise affect his health; he was, as I have
been informed by a lady who chanced to live near him, a remarkably
active and dauntless boy, full of all manner of fun, and ready for all
manner of mischief. He calls himself, in one of his introductions to
_Marmion_--
A self-willed imp; a grondame's child;
and I have heard it averred, that the circumstance of his lame foot
prompted him to take the lead among all the stirring boys in the
street where he lived, or the school which he attended: he desired,
perhaps, to show them, that there was a spirit which could triumph
over all impediments."[3] If this statement be correct, it is a
somewhat remarkable coincidence with the circumstance of Lord Byron's
lameness; though, happily, the influence of the accident on the
temperament of Scott is not traceable beyond his early years.
[3] Life of Sir Walter Scott; in the Athenaeum, No. 258.
Sir Walter was subsequently removed from Edinburgh, for the
improvement of his health, to the farm-house of Sandyknowe, then
inhabited by his paternal grandfather, and situated in the loveliest
part of the Vale of Tweed. In the neighbourhood, upon a considerable
eminence, stands Smailholm Tower, a Border fort which the future poet
enshrined in his admirable ballad, _The Eve of St. John_. The romantic
influence of the scenery of the whole district is told with much
vigour and sweetness in the introduction to the third canto of
_Marmion_.