in the old rumble-tumble farmhouses could give me a lesson,
and I am sure it increased my love and habit of reading more
than the austerities of a school could have done. I gave
trouble, I believe, in wishing to be taught, and in
self-defence gradually acquired the mystery myself. Johnnie
is infirm a little, though not so much so as I was, and often
he has brought back to my recollection the days of my own
childhood. I hope he will be twice any good that was in me,
with less carelessness."--Lang's _Life of Lockhart_, vol. i.
p. 397.]]

Robert {p.072} Scott died before his grandson was four years of age;
and I heard him mention when he was an old man that he distinctly
remembered the writing and sealing of the funeral letters, and all the
ceremonial of the melancholy procession as it left Sandy-Knowe. I
shall conclude my notices of the residence at Sandy-Knowe with
observing that in Sir Walter's account of the friendly clergyman who
so often sat at his grandfather's fireside, we cannot fail to trace
many features of the secluded divine in the novel of St. Ronan's Well.

I have nothing to add to what he has told us of that excursion to
England which interrupted his residence at Sandy-Knowe for about a
twelvemonth, except that I had often been astonished, long before I
read his autobiographic fragment, with the minute recollection he
seemed to possess of all the striking features of the city of Bath,
which he had never seen again since he quitted it before he was six
years of age. He has himself alluded, in his Memoir, to the lively
recollection he retained of his first visit to the theatre, to which
his Uncle Robert carried him to witness a representation of As You
Like It. In his reviewal of the Life of John Kemble, written in 1826,
he has recorded that impression more fully, and in terms so striking,
that I must copy them in this place:--

"There are few things which those gifted with any degree of
imagination recollect with a sense of more anxious and mysterious
delight than the first dramatic representation which they have
witnessed. The unusual form of the house, filled with such
groups {p.073} of crowded spectators, themselves forming an
extraordinary spectacle to the eye which has never witnessed it
before, yet all intent upon that wide and mystic curtain, whose
dusky undulations perm