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Sir Walter Scott
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Literary FiguresLiterary Criticism
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Publisher: Nishelle Books
Pages: 154
Weight: 0.47
Height: 0.33 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
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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