At school he was noted as a daring climber, a pertinacious fighter,
an irregular student, and a teller of fascinating tales. In the High
School he was "more distinguished in the yards than in the class." In
1783 he entered the Humanity and Greek classes in the University of
Edinburgh, but his education was directed by his genius rather than by
the school and college curriculum. He began on his grandfather's farm,
Sandy-Knowe, in a landscape that runs to the Cheviot Hills and the
slopes of Lammermoor, where he lay, a "puir lame laddie," on the turf
among the sheep. Out of a volume of Ramsay's "Tea Table Miscellany" he
was taught "Hardy Knute," long before he could read the ballad. "It was
the first poem I ever learned," he wrote years afterwards, "the last
I shall ever forget." His grandmother knew all the wild and romantic
stories of the Border and the eager boy listened with his heart and
imagination. He had only to look across the countryside to see many
of the places where these moving events had happened: the peaks of
Peebleshire, the crags of Hume, the landmarks of Ettrick and Yarrow;
the Brethren Stanes were among the objects that "painted the earliest
images on the eye of the last and greatest of the Border Minstrels."
When he was thirteen years old he came upon one of those books that
open the world of imagination to boys and girls of genius. He was
visiting his aunt in Kelso, which he describes as the most beautiful if
not the most romantic village in Scotland. The house stood in a garden
in which there was a great platanus tree (plane tree), and under its
branches, one summer afternoon, he opened "Percy's Reliques," which
had appeared nineteen years before, and the magic of the old, stirring
ballads which Bishop Percy had piously brought together, laid a spell
upon him which was never broken. "The summer day sped onward so fast,"
he wrote long afterwards, "that notwithstanding the sharp appetite of
thirteen, I forgot the hour of dinner, was sought for with anxiety, and
was still found entranced in my intellectual banquet." As soon as he
could "scrape five shillings together" he bought the volumes and read
no other books so often or with such enthusiasm.
[Illustration: ABBOTSFORD, SCOTLAND
The home of Walter Scott]
This vital education for the work he was to do was not interrupted
by his studies at the University. Hosts of Americans have climbed
Arthur's Seat and picked bluebells and looked down on one of the
most picturesque cities in Europe. Scott climbed this famous hill
and Salisbury Crags or Blackford Hill on Saturdays and in vacation,
carrying a bundle of books from a circulating library; and, overlooking
one of the most enchanting landscapes in Scotland, read Spenser,
Ariosto and other masters of romance. He learned to read Italian
and Spanish so as to get direct access to "Don Quixote" and the
"Decameron"; and Froissart he came to know almost by heart.