To this aunt, to his grandmother, his mother, and to the noble and most wise Rector of the High School of Edinburgh, Dr. Adam, Scott owed the essential part of his "education," which began in this manner. At eighteen months old his lameness came on, from sudden cold, bad air, and other such causes. His mother's father, Dr. Rutherford, advised sending him to the country; he is sent to his grandfather's at Sandy-Knowe, where he first becomes conscious of life, and where his grandmother and aunt Janet beautifully instruct, but partly spoil him. When he is eight years old, he returns to, and remains in, his father's house at George's Square. And now note the following sentence:-- "I felt the change from being a single indulged brat, to becoming a member of a large family, very severely; for under the gentle government of my kind grandmother, who was meekness itself, and of my aunt, who, though of a higher temper, was exceedingly attached to me, I had acquired a degree of license which could not be permitted in a large family. I had sense enough, however, to bend my temper to my new circumstances; but such was the agony which I internally experienced, that I have guarded against nothing more, in the education of my own family, than against their acquiring habits of self-willed caprice and domination." The indulgence, however, no less than the subsequent discipline, had been indeed altogether wholesome for the boy, he being of the noble temper which is the better for having its way. The essential virtue of the training he had in his grandfather's and father's house, and his aunt Jessie's at Kelso, I will trace further in next letter. FORS CLAVIGERA. LETTER XXXII. I do not know how far I shall be able in this letter to carry you forward in the story of Scott's life; let me first, therefore, map its divisions clearly; for then, wherever we have to stop, we can return to our point in fit time. First, note these three great divisions--essentially those of all men's lives, but singularly separate in his,--the days of youth, of labour, and of death. Youth is properly the forming time--that in which a man makes himself, or is made, what he is for ever to be. Then comes the time of labour, when, having become the best he can be, he does the best he can do. Then the time of death, which, in happy lives, is very short: but always a time. The ceasing to breathe is only the end of death. Scott records the beginning of his own in the following entry in his diary, which reviews the life then virtually ended:--