Sir Walter Scott was the first literary man of a great riding,
sporting, and fighting clan. Indeed, his father--a Writer to the
Signet, or Edinburgh solicitor--was the first of his race to adopt a
town life and a sedentary profession. Sir Walter was the lineal
descendant--six generations removed--of that Walter Scott commemorated
in _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, who is known in Border history and
legend as Auld Wat of Harden. Auld Wat's son William, captured by Sir
Gideon Murray, of Elibank, during a raid of the Scotts on Sir Gideon's
lands, was, as tradition says, given his choice between being hanged
on Sir Gideon's private gallows, and marrying the ugliest of Sir
Gideon's three ugly daughters, Meikle-mouthed Meg, reputed as carrying
off the prize of ugliness among the women of four counties. Sir
William was a handsome man. He took three days to consider the
alternative proposed to him, but chose life with the large-mouthed
lady in the end; and found her, according to the tradition which the
poet, her descendant, has transmitted, an excellent wife, with a fine
talent for pickling the beef which her husband stole from the herds of
his foes. Meikle-mouthed Meg transmitted a distinct trace of her large
mouth to all her descendants, and not least to him who was to use his
"meikle" mouth to best advantage as the spokesman of his race. Rather
more than half-way between Auld Wat of Harden's times--i. e., the
middle of the sixteenth century--and those of Sir Walter Scott, poet
and novelist, lived Sir Walter's great-grandfather, Walter Scott
generally known in Teviotdale by the surname of Beardie, because he
would never cut his beard after the banishment of the Stuarts, and who
took arms in their cause and lost by his intrigues on their behalf
almost all that he had, besides running the greatest risk of being
hanged as a traitor. This was the ancestor of whom Sir Walter speaks
in the introduction to the last canto of _Marmion_:--