It is scarcely necessary to recall that Scott on both sides of his house was connected with the Border Country--the 'bold bad Border' of a day happily long dead. He would have been a reiver himself, more than likely, and one of its nameless bards to boot, had he lived before the Border felt the subdued spirit of modern times. In the many-sided story of the Border, however, with its rare wealth of romanticism, Scott found his life-work. So that it was the Border which made him the force he is in the world of letters. No Borderer--no Scotsman, indeed, has taken truer and firmer hold of his countrymen. A descendant of Wat of Harden, linked to the best blood of the Border, and with every phase of his life redolent of the Border feeling, history has had no difficulty in claiming Sir Walter Scott as the most representative Border man the world has seen. He was not born in the Border Country, but practically all his life was spent there. His environment throughout was that of a Borderer. He belongs, to be sure, to every country. Like Shakespeare and Burns, Scott is one of the cosmopolitan heroes of literature, whose works are as widely cherished abroad as at home. Not a summer in the Border Country--the true 'Scott Country'--but is evidence of his universality. Scott gloried in the heritage that came to him from generations of Border ancestors, their cattle-lifting propensities notwithstanding. To belong to the Border--to Tweedside, to use his pet phrase--was never a superficial boast. It was because his most personal interests were bound up therein, and because he clung with a whole-hearted passion to the Border and to the Tweed, that these are to-day the most familiar of Scottish names. 'It is part of my creed,' he writes in an early letter to Patrick Murray, 'that the Tweed and Teviot yield to none in the world; nor do I fear that even in your eyes, which have been feasted on classic ground, they will greatly sink in comparison with the Tiber or Po!' Calais was not more indelible on Mary's heart than the Tweed was on Scott's. All the joyful strength of his life, says Ruskin, was spent in the Tweed valley. He came to the Border a sickly, delicate child, between his third and fourth year, and for threescore years and one he seldom left it for any lengthened interval. Edinburgh was his school, and his office, and the arena of much of his professional career. At a later period it was crowded with many painful memories. But he was happiest, even amid the most crushing sorrows of his life, when within earshot of the Tweed. There was not a blither or sunnier boyhood than Scott's at Rosebank, where even then he was 'making' himself, and dreaming of the days that were to be. At Ashestiel, the birthplace of the most popular poetry of the century before Byron blazed upon the literary horizon, his life was singularly untrammelled. Ashestiel, from being off the beaten track perhaps, seems to have lost favour somewhat with the Scott student.