the law itself. In 1806 he undertook gratuitously the duties of a
Clerk of Session--a permanent officer of the Court at Edinburgh--and
discharged them without remuneration for five years, from 1806 to
1811, in order to secure his ultimate succession to the office in the
place of an invalid, who for that period received all the emoluments
and did none of the work. Nevertheless Scott's legal abilities were so
well known, that it was certainly at one time intended to offer him a
Barony of the Exchequer, and it was his own doing, apparently, that it
was not offered. The life of literature and the life of the Bar hardly
ever suit, and in Scott's case they suited the less, that he felt
himself likely to be a dictator in the one field, and only a postulant
in the other. Literature was a far greater gainer by his choice, than
Law could have been a loser. For his capacity for the law he shared
with thousands of able men, his capacity for literature with few or
none.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 5: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, i. 269-71.]

[Footnote 6: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, i. 206.]

[Footnote 7: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ix. 221.]




CHAPTER III.

LOVE AND MARRIAGE.