'd what in youth its glance had been;
Whose doom discording neighbours sought,
Content with equity unbought;
To him the venerable priest,
Our frequent and familiar guest,
Whose life and manners well could paint
Alike the student and the saint;
Alas! whose speech too oft I broke
With gambol rude and timeless joke;
For I was wayward, bold, and wild,
A self-will'd imp, a grandame's child;
But, half a plague and half a jest,
Was still endured, beloved, caress'd."

A picture this of a child of great spirit, though with that spirit was
combined an active and subduing sweetness which could often conquer,
as by a sudden spell, those whom the boy loved. Towards those,
however, whom he did not love he could be vindictive. His relative,
the laird of Raeburn, on one occasion wrung the neck of a pet
starling, which the child had partly tamed. "I flew at his throat like
a wild-cat," he said, in recalling the circumstance, fifty years
later, in his journal on occasion of the old laird's death; "and was
torn from him with no little difficulty." And, judging from this
journal, I doubt whether he had ever really forgiven the laird of
Raeburn. Towards those whom he loved but had offended, his manner was
very different. "I seldom," said one of his tutors, Mr. Mitchell, "had
occasion all the time I was in the family to find fault with him, even
for trifles, and only once to threaten serious castigation, of which
he was no sooner aware, than he suddenly sprang up, threw his arms
about my neck and kissed me." And the quaint old gentleman adds this
commentary:--"By such generous and noble conduct my displeasure was in
a moment converted into esteem and admiration; my soul melted into
tenderness, and I was ready to mingle my tears with his." This
spontaneous and fascinating sweetness of his childhood was naturally
overshadowed to some extent in later life by Scott's masculine and
proud character, but it was always in him. And there was much of true
character in the child behind this sweetness. He had wonderful
self-command, and a peremptory kind of good sense, even in his
infancy. While yet a child under six years of age, hearing one of the
servants beginning to tell a ghost-story to another, and well knowing
that if he listened, it would scare away his night's rest, he acted
for himself with all the promptness of an elder person acting for him,
and, in spite of the fascination of the subject