SCOTT IN ADVERSITY
CHAPTER XVI.
THE LAST YEAR
CHAPTER XVII.
THE END OF THE STRUGGLE
SIR WALTER SCOTT.
CHAPTER I.
ANCESTRY, PARENTAGE, AND CHILDHOOD.
Sir 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 profession. 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 between being hanged
on Sir Gideon's private gallows, and marrying the ugliest 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
alternative 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.
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