A noted English critic said that he never sat down to write about Sir Walter Scott without a sense of elation and happiness; and he might have added without a sense of satisfaction. For the author of the Waverley Novels was a clean, wholesome, loyal human soul. The out-of-door vigor of the Highlands found in him not only a chronicler but an incarnation. At the end, when his strength was failing, his brain becoming darkened, the battle apparently going against him, his struggle against disaster became a moral victory and his character took on heroic proportions. At a time when so much writing is impaired by egotism, and mental and moral disease give prose and verse the odor of the hospitals, Scott brings a tonic atmosphere with him. He was a fortunate man; he was born in a country which he understood, at a time when the men, women, and events he wrote about were in the past but not too far in the past; and he was well born in the best sense. He came at the right time, in the right place, and of the right ancestry. In a word, he was in harmony with the conditions of his life, and he was spared the antagonism which often bends and sometimes breaks a promising talent and distorts a wholesome nature. Like Goethe he had a methodical father, of orderly habit, and a mother of generous heart, a vivid memory and the gift of pictorial talk. He said of her that if he had been able to paint past times it was largely because of "the studies with which she presented me." She had talked with a man who remembered the battle of Dunbar; and the day before her last illness she told, with great accuracy of detail, the real story of the Bride of Lammermoor, and indicated the points in which it differed from her son's famous novel. To his father Scott owed his steadiness of aim and his indomitable industry; to his mother he owed his vivid energy of mind, his tireless curiosity. [Illustration: PORTRAIT OF SCOTT By Sir Henry Raeburn] To Scotland his debt was even greater. Born in Edinburgh in 1771, four years before the beginning of the American Revolution, an illness in his second year sent him to reside with his grandfather in a country of crags and in the neighborhood of a ruined tower. In fine weather the shepherd took him to the places where the sheep were grazing and laid him on the ground among them. He was forgotten one day, and a thunderstorm broke on him. When he was found he was calling out, "bonny! bonny!" at each flash of lightning. His illness made him lame for life, but he was a boy of sweet temper and a winning disposition. Lameness did not daunt him; he learned to climb with great agility and to keep his saddle with the best of them. At the age of six he was reciting ballads with zest and fire, and he showed very early the spirit which made him a story-teller and a man of dauntless courage. The Boyhood of Scott