come from the two offices to which he was promoted, of Sheriff of Selkirk, and Clerk of the Court of Sessions, was so ample, combined with what fell to him by inheritance and marriage, that he was left at liberty freely to consult his own tastes, Amid the seductions of poetry, however, he never shrank from his burdensome professional duties; and he submitted to all their drudgery with unflinching constancy, when the labours of his pen made the emoluments almost beneath consideration. He never relished the idea of being divorced from active life by the solitary occupations of a recluse. And his official functions, however severely they taxed his time, may be said to have, in some degree, compensated him by the new scenes of life which they were constantly disclosing—the very materials of those fictions on which his fame and his fortune were to be built.
Scott's situation was eminently propitious to literary pursuits. He was married, and passed the better portion of the year in the country, where the quiet pleasures of his fireside circle, and a keen relish for rural sports, relieved his mind, and invigorated both health and spirits. In early life, it seems, he had been crossed in love; and, like Dante and Byron, to whom, in this respect, he is often compared, he had more than once, according to his biographer, shadowed forth in his verses the object of his unfortunate passion. He does not appear to have taken it very seriously, however, nor to have shown the morbid sensibility in relation to it discovered by both
