GREAT MEN'S BODIES
And rich was he in body.
"In spite of his lameness, he early taught himself to clamber about with an agility that few children could have surpassed, and he was always in the thick of the 'bickers,' or street-fights, with the boys of the town.… The masculine side of his life appeared to predominate a little too much in his school and college days. And he had such vast energy, vitality, and pride that his life at times would have borne a little taming under the influence of a sister thoroughly congenial to him. At sixteen he had an attack of hemorrhage, no recurrence of which took place for some forty years; but which was then the beginning of the end. No amount of drudgery or labor deterred Scott from any undertaking on the prosecution of which he was bent.… Above everything he was high spirited, a man of noble, and at the same time of martial, feelings. In his youth he often accomplished walks of thirty miles a day, which the lame lad yet found no fatigue to him."—Hutton's Life of Scott.
The following extract from Rab and his Friends will testify to the exuberant robustness of Scott's nature: "… The third was the biggest of the three, and though lame, he was nimble and all rough and alive with power. Had you met him anywhere else you would have said he was a Liddlesdale store-farmer come of gentle blood. 'A stout, blunt carle,' he says of himself; with the swing, and the stride, and the eye of a man of the hills—a large, sunny, out-of-door air all about him. On his broad and somewhat stooping shoulders was set that head which, with Shakespeare's and Bonaparte's, is the best known in all the world.
"He was in high spirits, keeping his companions and himself in roars of laughter; and every now and then seizing them and stopping, that they might take their
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