The poetical works of Sir Walter Scott, with memoir of the author.

X MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR.
had in after life a decided predilection. About
the time now under review, he -also acquired
French, Italian, and Spanish, all of which he afterwards read with sufficient ease; and the German language was learned a few years later, but
never critically understood.
During a severe illness, between his twelfth
and sixteenth year, his stores of romantic and
poetical reading received a vast increase, and
one of his schoolfellows has given an interesting
account of excursions in the neighbourhood of the
city, during this period, when the two youths read
poems and romances of knight-errantry, and exercised their invention in composing and relating
to each other interminable tales modelled on their
favourite books. The vocation of the romancewriter and poet of chivalry was thus already fixed.
His health likewise became permanently robust.
and Pe lameness in one leg, which was the sole
remnant of his early complaints, was through life
no obstacle to his habits of active bodilyexertion,
or to his love for out-of-door sports and exercise.
The next -step in his life did not seem directed
towards the goal to which all his favourite studies
pointed. His father, a formal, though high-spirited
and high-principled man, designed him for the
legal profession; and, although he was desirous
that his son should embrace the highest department of it, considered it advisable, according to a
practice not uncommon in Scotland, that he should