and so lost the
chance of distinguishing himself in the great naval campaigns of Nelson.
Perhaps Scott would have been all the better for a sister a little closer
to him than Anne--sickly and fanciful--appears ever to have been. The
masculine side of life appears to predominate a little too much in his
school and college days, and he had such vast energy, vitality, and pride,
that his life at this time would have borne a little taming under the
influence of a sister thoroughly congenial to him. In relation to his
studies he was wilful, though not perhaps perverse. He steadily declined,
for instance, to learn Greek, though he mastered Latin pretty fairly.
After a time spent at the High School, Edinburgh, Scott was sent to a
school at Kelso, where his master made a friend and companion of him, and
so poured into him a certain amount of Latin scholarship which he would
never otherwise have obtained. I need hardly add that as a boy Scott was,
so far as a boy could be, a Tory--a worshipper of the past, and a great
Conservative of any remnant of the past which reformers wished to get rid
of. In the autobiographical fragment of 1808, he says, in relation to
these school-days, "I, with my head on fire for chivalry, was a Cavalier;
my friend was a Roundhead; I was a Tory, and he was a Whig; I hated
Presbyterians, and admired Montrose with his victorious Highlanders; he
liked the Presbyterian Ulysses, the deep and politic Argyle; so that we
never wanted subjects of dispute, but our disputes were always amicable."
And he adds candidly enough: "In all these tenets there was no real
conviction on my part, arising out of acquaintance with the views or
principles of either party.... I took up politics at that period, as King
Charles II. did his religion, from an idea that the Cavalier creed was the
more gentlemanlike persuasion of the two." And the uniformly amicable
character of these controversies between the young people, itself shows
how much more they were controversies of the imagination than of faith. I
doubt whether Scott's _convictions_ on the issues of the Past were ever
very much more decided than they were during his boyhood; though
undoubtedly he learned to understand much more profoundly what was really
held by the ablest men on both sides of these disputed issues. The
result, however, was, I think, that while he entered better and better
into both sides as life went on, he never adopted either with any
earnestness of conv