Certainly Ellis's criticism on his
poems was the truest and best that Scott ever received; and had he
lived to read his novels,--only one of which was published before
Ellis's death,--he might have given Scott more useful help than either
Ballantyne or even Erskine.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 19: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, i. 214.]
[Footnote 20: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, iii. 344.]
[Footnote 21: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ix. 75.]
[Footnote 22: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ii. 56.]
[Footnote 23: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ii. 168-9.]
CHAPTER VII.
FIRST COUNTRY HOMES.
So completely was Scott by nature an out-of-doors man that he cannot
be adequately known either through his poems or through his friends,
without also knowing his external surroundings and occupations. His
first country home was the cottage at Lasswade, on the Esk, about six
miles from Edinburgh, which he took in 1798, a few months after his
marriage, and retained till 1804. It was a pretty little cottage, in
the beautification of which Scott felt great pride, and where he
exercised himself in the small beginnings of those tastes for altering
and planting which grew so rapidly upon him, and at last enticed him
into castle-building and tree-culture on a dangerous, not to say,
ruinous scale.
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