With such scenes touching even his own home, Scott
must have been constantly taught to balance in his own mind, the more
romantic, against the more sober and rational considerations, which
had so recently divided house against house, even in the same family
and clan. That the stern Calvinistic lawyer should have retained so
much of his grandfather Beardie's respect for the adherents of the
exiled house of Stuart, must in itself have struck the boy as even
more remarkable than the passionate loyalty of the Stuarts' professed
partisans, and have lent a new sanction to the romantic drift of his
mother's old traditions, and one to which they must have been indebted
for a great part of their fascination.
Walter Scott, the ninth of twelve children, of whom the first six died
in early childhood, was born in Edinburgh, on the 15th of August,
1771. Of the six later-born children, all but one were boys, and the
one sister was a somewhat querulous invalid, whom he seems to have
pitied almost more than he loved. At the age of eighteen months the
boy had a teething-fever, ending in a life-long lameness; and this was
the reason why the child was sent to reside with his grandfather--the
speculative grandfather, who had doubled his capital by buying a
racehorse instead of sheep--at Sandy-Knowe, near the ruined tower of
Smailholm, celebrated afterwards in his ballad of _The Eve of St.
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