_Author and Editor_
_MENTOR GRAVURES_
LUCY AND THE MASTER
"_The Bride of Lammermoor_"
THE BLACK KNIGHT AT THE HERMITAGE
"_Ivanhoe_"
VARNEY, LEICESTER AND AMY ROBSART
"_Kenilworth_"
FLORA MacIVOR
"_Waverley_"
MEG MERRILIES DIRECTS BERTRAM TO THE CAVE
"_Guy Mannering_"
EFFIE DEANS AND GEORDIE
"_Heart of Midlothian_"
Entered as second-class matter March 10, 1913, at the postoffice at New
York, N. Y., under the act of March 3, 1879. Copyright, 1916, by The
Mentor Association, Inc.
[Illustration: Bust of Sir Walter Scott
By Sir Francis Chantrey]
THE MENTOR · DEPARTMENT OF LITERATURE
SEPTEMBER 15, 1916
A noted English critic said that he never sat down to write about
Sir Walter Scott without a sense of elation and happiness; and he
might have added without a sense of satisfaction. For the author of
the Waverley Novels was a clean, wholesome, loyal human soul. The
out-of-door vigor of the Highlands found in him not only a chronicler
but an incarnation. At the end, when his strength was failing, his
brain becoming darkened, the battle apparently going against him, his
struggle against disaster became a moral victory and his character took
on heroic proportions. At a time when so much writing is impaired by
egotism, and mental and moral disease give prose and verse the odor of
the hospitals, Scott brings a tonic atmosphere with him.
He was a fortunate man; he was born in a country which he understood,
at a time when the men, women, and events he wrote about were in the
past but not too far in the past; and he was well born in the best
sense. He came at the right time, in the right place, and of the right
ancestry. In a word, he was in harmony with the conditions of his life,
and he was spared the antagonism which often bends and sometimes breaks
a promising talent and distorts a wholesome nature. Like Goethe he had
a methodical father, of orderly habit, and a mother of generous heart,
a vivid memory and the gift of pictorial talk. He said of her that if
he had been able to paint past times it was largely because of "the
studies with which she presented me." She had talked with a man who
remembered the battle of Dunbar; and the day before her last illness
she told, with great accuracy of detail, the real story of the Bride
of Lammermoor, and indicated the points in which it differed from her
son's famous novel. To his father Scott owed his steadiness of aim and
his indomitable industry; to his mother he owed his vivid energy of
mind, his tireless curiosity.
[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF SCOTT
By Sir Henry Raeburn]
To Scotland his debt was even greater. Born in Edinburgh in 1771, four
years before the beginning of the American Revolution, an illness in
his second year sent him to reside with his grandfather in a country
of crags and in the neighborhood of a ruined tower. In fine weather
the shepherd took him to the places where the sheep were grazing
and laid him on the ground among them. He was forgotten one day, and
a thunderstorm broke on him. When he was found he was calling out,
"bonny! bonny!" at each flash of lightning. His illness made him lame
for life, but he was a boy of sweet temper and a winning disposition.
Lameness did not daunt him; he learned to climb with great agility
and to keep his saddle with the best of them. At the age of six he
was reciting ballads with zest and fire, and he showed very early the
spirit which made him a story-teller and a man of dauntless courage.