and he was certainly a man of some means and trained intelligence. After the breaking out of the civil war, he entered the parliamentary army as a major, and on the occurrence of a vacancy in the representation of Aylesbury was elected to the Long parliament. Belonging to the ultra-republican party, he was a member of the high court of justice by which Charles was condemned, attending its sittings very regularly, and signing the warrant for the king's execution. After the execution, it was on his report that the administration of affairs was intrusted to a council of state, of which he became an active member. He did not accept Cromwell's dismissal of the Rump and the establishment of the protectorate, which he opposed in parliament and out of it, adhering with Hazelrig and Vane to his original republicanism. The death of Cromwell restored him to brief authority. He was appointed secretary of state by the council established after Richard Cromwell's fall. With the Restoration, he fled to Flanders, where in the hope, it would seem, that he might benefit by the act of indemnity, he surrendered, and was brought to England. He was tried, however, at the Old Bailey on the 12th of October, 1660, and executed at Charing Cross on the 17th. In his dying speech he called the cause for which he suffered, a "cause not to be repented of." Of "peppery Scot," as Carlyle calls him, there is a memoir, and of his trial, a full report, in Noble's Lives of the Regicides.—F. E.
SCOTT, Thomas, the well-known commentator, was born at Braytoft near Spilsby, Lincolnshire, 16th February, 1747. After some education at the endowed school of Scorton, he was apprenticed to a surgeon, and soon dismissed, returning home and engaging for nine years in the business of his father, who was a grazier. Thomas was the tenth son, and the farm was not to descend to him. As the idea of life-long manual occupation became more and more distasteful to him, the love of study grew in him. He gave his spare hours to Latin and Greek, and made great proficiency. Desirous of entering the church, though he had no adequate idea of pastoral work or motive, and his classical qualifications being found surprisingly great in his unpropitious circumstances, he was ordained 20th September, 1772. He first had the curacy of Stoke-Goldington and Weston-Underwood in Buckinghamshire, exchanged in 1775 for that of Ravenstone. A short time before this exchange his soul had been awakened, and by the influence of Newton his eager spirit laid firm and lasting hold of evangelical truth. Becoming curate of Olney in 1780, his mind was brought into fellowship with Cowper. In 1785 he became chaplain of the Lock hospital, and in 1801 rector of Aston-Sandford, where he laboured till his death, on the 16th of April, 1821. Scott's works are numerous—"The force of Truth," in 1779, a remarkable record of the various phases of religious opinions and feelings through which he had passed—Socinian, Pelagian, and Arminian—till he finally reposed in a Calvinism wrought out by himself from prolonged and prayerful study of the divine word; "Vindication of the Inspiration of Scripture, &c., against Paine," in 1796; "Remarks on the Bishop of Lincoln's Refutation of Calvinism," 1812, a solid, sensible, and honest production. Scott published many sermons and minor treatises. His principal work is his "Commentary," of which the first edition of five thousand copies appeared in 1796. By it and the second edition of two thousand copies, through a faulty arrangement with the publisher, he lost money. Other and large editions were published, and many thousand copies have been sold both in this country and in America. The "Commentary," without being original or profound, is always sensible and judicious in substance, and plain and perspicuous in style. The meaning is given with unaffected and honest care, without parade, and always in a spiritual frame of mind; gravity and warmth characterize the work, the end of which is God's glory in the exposition of his truth. The pious and venerable author spared no pains or labour, having carefully and unweariedly superintended five editions.—J. E.
SCOTT or ROTHERHAM, Thomas. See Rotherham.
SCOTT, Sir Walter, Bart., the greatest literary man of the present age, was descended from an old family of border freebooters, was the son of a writer to the signet, and was born in the College Wynd, Edinburgh, on the 10th of August, 1771. His mother, Ann Rutherford, was the daughter of one of the medical professors in the university of his native city. Walter was the seventh of a family of twelve, six of whom lived to maturity, but only two, the poet and his brother Thomas, left any descendants. Before he had completed his second year a fever, attended with a lameness which proved permanent, seriously impaired his health, and caused soon after his removal to Sandy-Knowe, the farm-house of his paternal grandfather. At this place, close beside the ruined fortalice of Smailholm, overlooking the course of the Tweed, and an extensive tract of country studded with spots famous in border history, Scott lived till his eighth year (with the exception of a few months spent at Bath); and both its romantic localities, and the old stories of his marauding ancestors to which he listened, produced a deep and indelible impression upon his mind. He returned to Edinburgh in 1779 with health partially confirmed, and was sent to the high school of that city, where he became distinguished for his courage, extraordinary memory, vast store of miscellaneous information, and his skill in story-telling, rather than for accurate scholarship. "I left the high school," he says, "with a great quantity of general information, ill-arranged, indeed, and collected without system, yet deeply impressed upon my mind, readily assorted by my power of connection and memory, and gilded, if I may be permitted to say so, by a vivid and active imagination." In November, 1783, Scott entered the university; but owing partly to the disadvantages under which he laboured, partly to his disinclination for some of its branches of study, he does not appear to have derived much advantage from his attendance at that seminary. He continued, however, to devour romances, old plays, epic poetry, history, and travels, with an insatiable appetite; and about this time he also acquired a knowledge of the French, Italian, and Spanish languages. A few years later, his study of the German had an important influence on his poetical career. In his fifteenth year (May, 1786) he was indentured as an apprentice to his father, who wished him to be his own successor in business, and applied himself with diligence to the discharge of his professional duties, though at the same time he prosecuted with undiminished ardour his historical and imaginative reading. On the expiry of his apprenticeship in 1790, he resolved, with his father's approbation, to follow another branch of the legal profession; and having passed through the usual studies, he was admitted a member of the Faculty of Advocates in 1792. The Speculative Society had in the previous year made him acquainted with Jeffrey and other distinguished contemporaries, while his frequent excursions to the Highlands and to the border district, furnished him with the materials which he afterwards employed with such effect in his poems and tales. He was famous in those days for his high spirits and general good humour, his fondness for old ballads and legends and antiquarian pursuits, and his inimitable power of story-telling, rather than for any exhibitions of literary or poetical talent. He obtained a fair measure of success in his profession, though he ere long began to suspect that his real vocation lay in another direction. In the end of 1797 he married Miss Charlotte Carpenter, the daughter of a French emigrant, whose small fortune added something to his income; and his subsequent appointment, first in 1799 to the sheriffdom of Selkirkshire, and subsequently in 1806 to the office of one of the principal clerks of the court of session, put him in possession of a handsome competency. Shortly before this time (May, 1805) he had become a partner in the printing-house of James Ballantyne & Co., though the fact was kept a profound secret. "The influence of this connection," says Lockhart, "on his literary exertions and worldly fortunes, was productive of much good and not a little evil," leading, as it did in a few years, to the false step of setting up a publishing house in Edinburgh, under the firm of John Ballantyne & Co., which produced in the end a most disastrous effect upon his worldly fortunes. From this time almost to the close of his life, he was incessantly engaged in a course of literary industry, which has been rarely equalled among men of genius in our own or in any other age. His first appearance on the field on which he was destined to achieve such a brilliant renown, was in 1796, when he published a metrical translation of some of Burger's German ballads. Two years later appeared his translation of a prose drama of Göthe's; and in 1799 he wrote his spirited ballads of "Glenfinlas," the "Eve of St. John," and the "Grey Brother." In 1802 he published his "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border," a collection of the ballad poetry of the district in which his ancestors had lived lives of "sturt and strife," illustrated by an elaborate introduction and copious notes, which display great sagacity, good sense, and multifarious knowledge, and contain, as Jeffrey shrewdly remarked, the materials of a hundred romances.
