But though the wonder of his life is seen in this, the romance of it yet remains. He arose to fill a great and remarkable point of time. A new era was commencing, which was to be enriched out of the neglected matter of the old. The suppression of the rebellion of 1745 was the really vitalizing act of the union of Scotland and England. By it the old clan life and spirit were extinguished. The spirit which maintained a multitude of old forms, costumes, and modes of life, was by that event annihilated; and the rapid amalgamation of the two nations in a time of internal peace, would soon have obliterated much that was extremely picturesque and full of character, were it not seized and made permanent by some mighty and comprehensive mind. That mind was Scott's! He stood on the threshold of a new world, with the falling fabric of the past close beneath his view. Every circumstance which was necessary to make him the preserver of the memory and life of this past world met in him, as by a marked decree of the Almighty. He had all the sensibility and imagination of the past, with the keenest relish of every thing that was prominent in living character among his fellow-men. He was inspired with the love of nature, as an undying passion, by having been, in his earliest years, suffered to run wild amid the rocks of Smailholm, and the beautiful scenery of Kelso. The Reliques of Ancient English Poetry--that herald of nature to all that were capable of loving her at that period, and which, without saying a word about the false taste of the age, at once awoke in it the true one, was to him but the revelation of still further relics of the like kind in his own country. He had heard similar strains from his nurses--from the country people among whom he had been cast, from the ladies of his family; and Percy's volume was but as a trumpet note, awakening him to a consciousness of poetic wealth, that lay all around him thick as the dews of a spring morning. In highland and in lowland, but especially along that wild border-land which had become the delight of his boyhood, the lays and the traditions of the past were in every mouth, and awaited some fortunate hand to gather them. His was the hand destined to do that and more. Every step that he made in the pursuit of the old ballad literature of his country, only showed him more and more of the immense mass of the materials of poetry and romance which the past ages had neglected as vulgar. The so-called poets of two or three generations had gone about on the stilts of classical pride; and had overlooked, nay, had scorned to touch even with their shoe-toes, the golden ore of romantic character and deed, that lay in actual heaps on every mountain, and along every mountain stream. Young Scott, transported at the sight, flew east and west; traversed mountain and heath, with all the buoyancy of youth and the throbbing pulse of poetry. He went among the common people; and amid shepherds, and with housewives at their