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Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) by Richard Holt Hutton
page 10 of 175 (05%)
and had an excellent memory, she could draw, without the least
exaggeration or affectation, the most striking pictures of the past
age. If I have been able to do anything in the way of painting the
past times, it is very much from the studies with which she presented
me. She connected a long period of time with the present generation,
for she remembered, and had often spoken with, a person who perfectly
recollected the battle of Dunbar and Oliver Cromwell's subsequent
entry into Edinburgh." On the day before the stroke of paralysis which
carried her off, she had told Mr. and Mrs. Scott of Harden, "with
great accuracy, the real story of the Bride of Lammermuir, and pointed
out wherein it differed from the novel. She had all the names of the
parties, and pointed out (for she was a great genealogist) their
connexion with existing families."[1] Sir Walter records many
evidences of the tenderness of his mother's nature, and he returned
warmly her affection for himself. His executors, in lifting up his
desk, the evening after his burial, found "arranged in careful order a
series of little objects, which had obviously been so placed there
that his eye might rest on them every morning before he began his
tasks. These were the old-fashioned boxes that had garnished his
mother's toilette, when he, a sickly child, slept in her
dressing-room,--the silver taper-stand, which the young advocate had
bought for her with his first five-guinea fee,--a row of small packets
inscribed with her hand, and containing the hair of those of her
offspring that had died before her,--his father's snuff-box, and
etui-case,--and more things of the like sort."[2] A story,
characteristic of both Sir Walter's parents, is told by Mr. Lockhart
which will serve better than anything I can remember to bring the
father and mother of Scott vividly before the imagination. His father,
like Mr. Alexander Fairford, in _Redgauntlet_, though himself a strong
Hanoverian, inherited enough feeling for the Stuarts from his
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