placed over his grave. In 1838 Scott married his cousin, Caroline Oldrid, who died in 1870; they had five sons, two of whom adopted their father's profession.
An incomplete list of his works from 1847 in the Builder for 1878 (p. 360) ascribes to Scott 732 buildings with which he was connected as architect, restorer or the author of a report. These include 29 cathedrals, British or colonial, 10 minsters, 476 churches, 25 schools, 23 parsonages, 58 monumental works, 25 colleges or college chapels, 26 public buildings, 43 mansions and a number of small ecclesiastical accessories. While a member of the Royal Academy, Scott held for many years the post of professor of architecture, and gave a long series of able lectures on medieval styles, which were published in 1879. He wrote a work on Domestic Architecture, and a volume of Personal and Professional Recollections, which, edited by his eldest son, was published in 1879, and also a large number of articles and reports on many of the ancient buildings with which he had to deal.
SCOTT, MICHAEL (1789–1835), British author, was born at
Cowlairs, near Glasgow, on the 30th of October 1789, the son of
a Glasgow merchant. In 1806 he went to Jamaica, first managing
some estates, and afterwards joining a business firm in Kingston.
The latter post necessitated his making frequent journeys,
on the incidents of which he based his best known book, Tom Cringle's Log. In 1822 he left Jamaica and settled in Glasgow,
where he engaged in business. Tom Cringle's Log began to appear
serially in Blackwood's Magazine in 1829. Scott's second
story, The Cruise of the Midge, was also first published serially
in Blackwood's in 1834–1835. The first appearance in book-form
of each story was in Paris in 1834. Both stories were originally
published anonymously, and their authorship was not known till
after Scott's death at Glasgow, on the 7th of November 1835.
SCOTT, ROBERT (1811–1887), English divine and lexicographer,
was born on the 26th of January 1811, at Bondleigh
in Devonshire, where his father was rector. Educated at
Shrewsbury School and Christ Church, Oxford, after a brilliant
university career he was elected fellow of Balliol, where he was
tutor from 1835 to 1840. After holding successively the college
livings of Duloe and South Luffenham, in 1854 he was elected
master of Balliol. This office he held, together (from 1861)
with that of the professorship of the exegesis of Holy Scriptures,
down to 1870, when he accepted the deanery of Rochester.
As master of Balliol he kept the college up to the high level it
had attained under his predecessor Dr Jenkyns. As a Greek
scholar, he had few equals among his contemporaries. His
great literary achievement, which may be said to constitute
his life's work, was his collaboration with Dean Liddell in the
Greek lexicon which bears their names. He died at Rochester
on the 2nd of December 1887.
SCOTT, SIR WALTER Bart. (1771–1832),
Scottish poet and
novelist, was born at Edinburgh on the 15th of August 1771.
His pedigree, in which he took a pride that strongly influenced
the course of his life, may be given in the words of his own
fragment of autobiography. “My birth was neither distinguished
nor sordid. According to the prejudices of my country
it was esteemed gentle, as I was connected, though remotely,
with ancient families both by my father's and mother's side.
My father's grandfather was Walter Scott, well known by the
name of Beardie. He was the second son of Walter Scott, first
laird of Raeburn, who was third son of Sir William Scott, and
the grandson of Walter Scott, commonly called in tradition
Auld Watt of Harden. I am therefore lineally descended from
that ancient chieftain, whose name I have made to ring in many
a ditty, and from his fair dame, the Flower of Yarrow — no
bad genealogy for a Border minstrel.”
In a notice of John Home, Scott speaks of pride of family as “natural to a man of imagination,” remarking that, “in this motley world, the family pride of the north country has its effects of good and of evil.” Whether the good or the evil preponderated in Scott's own case would not be easy to determine. It tempted him into courses that ended in commercial ruin; but throughout his life it was a constant spur to exertion, and in his last years it proved itself as a working principle capable of inspiring and maintaining a most chivalrous conception of duty. If the ancient chieftain Auld Watt was, according to the anecdote told by his illustrious descendant, once reduced in the matter of live stock to a single cow, and recovered his dignity by stealing the cows of his English neighbours, Scott's Border ancestry were sheep-farmers, who varied their occupation by “lifting” sheep and cattle, and whatever else was “neither too heavy nor too hot.” The Border lairds were really a race of shepherds in so far as they were not a race of robbers. Scott may have derived from this pastoral ancestry an hereditary bias towards the observation of nature and the enjoyment of open-air life. He certainly inherited from them the robust strength of constitution that carried him successfully through so many exhausting labours. And it was his pride in their real or supposed feudal dignity and their rough marauding exploits that first directed him to the study of Border history and poetry, the basis of his fame as a poet and romancer. His father, Walter Scott, a writer to the signet (or attorney) in Edinburgh — the original of the elder Fairford in Redgauntlet — was the first of the family to adopt a town life or a learned profession. His mother was the daughter of Dr John Rutherford, a medical professor in the university of Edinburgh, who also traced descent from the chiefs of famous Border clans. The ceilings of Abbotsford display the arms of about a dozen Border families with which Scott claimed kindred through one side or the other. His father was conspicuous for methodical and thorough industry; his mother was a woman of imagination and culture. The son seems to have inherited the best qualities of the one and acquired the best qualities of the other.
The details of his early education are given with great precision in his autobiography. John Stuart Mill was not more minute in recording the various circumstances that shaped his habits of mind and work. We learn from himself the secret — as much at least as could be ascribed to definite extraneous accident — of the “extempore speed” in romantic composition against which Carlyle protested in his famous review of Lockhart's Life of Scott. The indignant critic assumed that Scott wrote “without preparation”; Scott himself, as if he had foreseen this cavil, is at pains to show that the preparation began with his boyhood, almost with his infancy. The current legend when Carlyle wrote his essay was that as a boy Scott had been a dunce and an idler. With a characteristically conscientious desire not to set a bad example, the autobiographer solemnly declares that he was neither a dunce nor an idler, and explains how the misunderstanding arose. His health in boyhood was uncertain;[1] he was consequently irregular in his attendance
- ↑ Dr Charles Creighton contributes the following medical note on Scott's early illness: — “Scott's lameness was owing to an arrest of growth in the right leg in infancy. When he was eighteen months old he had a feverish attack lasting three days, at the end of which time it was found that he ‘had lost the power of his right leg’ — i.e. the child instinctively declined to move the ailing member. The malady was a swelling at the ankle, and either consisted in or gave rise to arrest of the bone-forming function along the growing line of cartilage which connects the lower epiphysis of each of the two leg-bones with its shaft. In his fourth year, when he had otherwise recovered, the leg remained ‘much shrunk and contracted.’ The limb would have been blighted very much more if the arrest of growth had taken place at the upper epiphysis of the tibia or the lower epiphysis of the femur. The narrowness and peculiar depth of Scott's head point to some more general congenital error of bone-making allied to rickets but certainly not the same as that malady. The vault of the skull is the typical ‘scaphoid’ or boat-shaped formation, due to premature union of the two parietal bones along the sagittal suture. When the bones of the cranium are universally affected with that arrest of growth along their formative edges, the sutures become prematurely fixed and effaced, so that the brain-case cannot expand in any direction to accommodate the growing brain. This universal synostosis of the cranial bones is what occurs in the case of microcephalous idiots. It happened to me to show to an eminent French anthropologist a specimen of a miniature or microcephalic skull preserved in the Cambridge museum of anatomy; the French savant, holding up the skull and pointing to the ‘scaphoid’ vault of the crown and the effaced sagittal suture, exclaimed ‘Voilà Walter Scott!’ Scott had fortunately escaped the early closure or arrest of growth at other cranial sutures than the sagittal, so that the growing brain could make room for itself by forcing up the vault of the skull bodily. When his head was opened after death, it was observed that ‘the brain was not large, and the cranium thinner than it is usually found to be.’ In favour of the theory of congenital liability it has to be said that he was the ninth of a family of whom the first six died in ‘very early youth.’”
