And most men are apt to forget it themselves. Pardon me for speaking of myself for a moment; (if I did not know things by my own part in them, I would not write of them at all). You know that people sometimes call me a good writer: others like to hear me speak. I seldom mis-spell or mis-pronounce a word, grossly; and can generally say what I want to say. Well, my own impression about this power, such as it may be, is that it was born with me, or gradually gained by my own study. It is only by deliberate effort that I recall the long morning hours of toil, as regular as sunrise,--toil on both sides equal,--by which, year after year, my mother forced me to learn all the Scotch paraphrases by heart, and ever so many chapters of the Bible besides, (the eighth of 1st Kings being one,--try it, good reader, in a leisure hour!) allowing not so much as a syllable to be missed or misplaced; while every sentence was required to be said over and over again till she was satisfied with the accent of it. I recollect a struggle between us of about three weeks, concerning the accent of the "of" in the lines "Shall any following spring revive The ashes of the urn?" I insisting, partly in childish obstinacy, and partly in true instinct for rhythm (being wholly careless on the subject both of urns and their contents), on reciting it, "The ashes of the urn." It was not, I say, till after three weeks' labour, that my mother got the accent laid upon the ashes, to her mind. But had it taken three years, she would have done it, having once undertaken to do it. And, assuredly, had she not done it, I had been simply an avaricious picture collector, or perhaps even a more avaricious money collector, to this day; and had she done it wrongly, no after-study would ever have enabled me to read so much as a single line of verse. It is impossible, either in history or biography, to arrange what one wants to insist upon wholly by time, or wholly by rational connection. You must observe that the visit to England, of which I am now going to speak, interrupts, with a brilliant display of pyrotechnic light, the steady burning of the stars above Scott's childhood. From the teaching of his aunt, before he could read, I should like, for several reasons, to go on at once to the teaching of his mother, after he could read; but I must content myself, for the moment, with adding the catalogue of mamma's library to that of aunt Jessie's. On the window-seat of Sandy-Knowe--only to be got at the pith of by help of auntie--we had the odd volume of Josephus, Automathes, and two or three old books not named. A year later, mamma provides for us--now scholars ourselves--Pope's Homer, Allan Ramsay's Evergreen, and, for Sundays, Bunyan, Gesner's Death of Abel, and Rowe's (Mrs.) Letters from the Other World. But we have made our grand tour in the meantime, and have some new ideas of this world in our head; of which the reader must now consider.