Beschreibung
Produktdetails
Einband
Taschenbuch
Erscheinungsdatum
30.08.2026
Verlag
Nishelle BooksSeitenzahl
154
Maße (L/B/H)
22,9/15,2/0,9 cm
Gewicht
234 g
Sprache
Englisch
EAN
9798182714709
ANCESTRY, PARENTAGE, AND CHILDHOOD. S ir Walter Scott was the first literary man of a great riding, sporting, and fighting clan. Indeed, his father-a Writer to the Signet, or Edinburgh solicitor-was the first of his race to adopt a town life and a sedentary pro- fession. Sir Walter was the lineal descendant-six generations removed-of that Walter Scott commemorated in The Lay of the Last Minstrel, who is known in Border history and legend as Auld Wat of Harden. Auld Wat's son William, captured by Sir Gideon Murray, of Elibank, during a raid of the Scotts on Sir Gideon's lands, was, as tradition says, given his choice be- tween being hanged on Sir Gideon's private gallows, and marrying the ugli- est of Sir Gideon's three ugly daughters, Meikle-mouthed Meg, reputed as carrying off the prize of ugliness among the women of four counties. Sir William was a handsome man. He took three days to consider the alterna- tive proposed to him, but chose life with the large-mouthed lady in the end; and found her, according to the tradition which the poet, her descendant, has transmitted, an excellent wife, with a fine talent for pickling the beef which her husband stole from the herds of his foes. Meikle-mouthed Meg transmitted a distinct trace of her large mouth to all her descendants, and 3 RICHARD HOLT HUTTON not least to him who was to use his "meikle" mouth to best advantage as the spokesman of his race. Rather more than half-way between Auld Wat of Harden's times-i. e., the middle of the sixteenth century-and those of Sir Walter Scott, poet and novelist, lived Sir Walter's great-grandfather, Walter Scott generally known in Teviotdale by the surname of Beardie, because he would never cut his beard after the banishment of the Stuarts, and who took arms in their cause and lost by his intrigues on their behalf almost all that he had, besides running the greatest risk of being hanged as a traitor. This was the ancestor of whom Sir Walter speaks in the introduction to the last canto of Marmion:- "And thus my Christmas still I hold, Where my great grandsire came of old, With amber beard and flaxen hair, And reverend apostolic air,- The feast and holy tide to share, And mix sobriety with wine, And honest mirth with thoughts divine; Small thought was his in after time E'er to be hitch'd into a rhyme, The simple sire could only boast That he was loyal to his cost; The banish'd race of kings revered, And lost his land-but kept his beard." Sir Walter inherited from Beardie that sentimental Stuart bias which his bet- ter judgment condemned, but which seemed to be rather part of his blood than of his mind. And most useful to him this sentiment undoubtedly was in helping him to restore the mould and fashion of the past. Beardie's sec- ond son was Sir Walter's grandfather, and to him he owed not only his first childish experience of the delights of country life, but also,-in his own
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