The Lady of the Lake appeared in May 1810, being published by Ballantyne and Miller, and at once attained enormous popularity. Twenty thousand copies were sold within the year, two thousand of which were costly quartos; and while there can be no doubt that this was the highest point of Scott's poetical vogue, there is, I believe, not much doubt that the poem has always continued to be a greater favourite with the general than any other of his. It actually, more than any other, created the furore for Scottish scenery and touring, which has never ceased since; it supplied in the descriptions of that scenery, in the fight between Roderick and Fitz-James, and in other things, his most popular passages; and it has remained probably the type of his poetry to the main body of readers.

Yet there are some who like it less than any other of the major divisions of that poetry, and this is by no means necessarily due either to a desire to be eccentric or to the subtler but almost equally illegitimate operation of the want of novelty—of the fact that its best effects are but repetitions of those of Marmion and the Lay. For, fine as it is, it seems to me to display the drawbacks of Scott's scheme and method more than any of the longer poems. Douglas, Ellen, Malcolm, are null; Roderick and the king have a touch of theatricality which I look for in vain elsewhere in Scott; there is nothing fantastic in the piece like the Goblin Page, and nothing tragical like Constance. There is something teasing in what has been profanely called the 'guide-book' character—the cicerone-like fidelity which contrasts so strongly with the skilfully subordinated description in the two earlier and even in the later poems. Moreover, though Ellis ought not to have called the octosyllable 'the Hudibrastic measure' (which is only a very special variety of it), he was certainly right in objecting to its great predominance in unmixed form here.

The critics, however, sang the praises of the poem lustily. Even Jeffrey—perhaps because it was purely Scottish (he had thought Marmion not Scottish enough), perhaps because its greater conventionality appealed to him, perhaps because he wished to make atonement—was extremely complimentary. And certainly no one need be at a loss for things to commend positively, whatever may be his comparative estimate. The fine Spenserian openings (which Byron copied almost slavishly in the form of the stanza he took for Harold), the famous beginning of the stag, the description of the pass (till Fitz-James begins to soliloquise), some of the songs (especially the masterly 'Coronach'), the passage of the Fiery Cross, the apparition of the clan (not perhaps so great as some have thought it, but still great), the struggle, the guard-room (which shocked Jeffrey dreadfully)—these are only some of the best things. But I own that I turn from the best of them to the last stand of the spearmen at Flodden, and the unburying of the Book in the Lay.

It may, perhaps, not be undesirable to anticipate somewhat, in order to complete the sketch of the verse romances in this chapter; for not very long after the publication of the Lady of the Lake, Scott resumed the writing of Waverley, which effected an entire change in the direction of his literature; and it was not a twelvemonth later that he planned the establishment at Abbotsford, which was thenceforward the headquarters of his life.

The first poem to follow was one which lay out of the series in subject, scheme, and dress, and which perhaps should rather be counted with his minor and miscellaneous pieces—The Vision of Don Roderick. It was written with rapidity, even for him, and with a special purpose; the profits being promised beforehand to the Committee of the Portuguese Relief Fund, formed to assist the sufferers from Massena's devastations. It consists of rather less than a hundred Spenserian stanzas, the story of Roderick merely ushering in a magical revelation, to that too-amorous monarch, of the fortunes of the Peninsular War and its heroes up to the date of writing. The Edinburgh Review, which hated the war, was very angry because Scott did not celebrate Sir John Moore (whether as a good Whig or a bad general it did not explain); but even Jeffrey was not entirely unfavourable, and the piece was otherwise well received. The description of the subterranean hall beneath the Cathedral of Toledo is as good as we should expect, and the verses on Saragossa and on the forces of the three kingdoms are very fine. But the whole was something of a torso, and it is improbable that Scott could ever have used the Spenserian stanza to good effect for continuous narrative. Even in its individual shape, that great form requires the artistic patience as well as the natural gift of men like its inventor, or like Thomson, Shelley, and Tennyson, in other times and of other schools, to get the full effect out of it; while to connect it satisfactorily with its kind and adjust it to narrative is harder still.

The true succession, however, after this parenthesis, was taken up by Rokeby, which was dated on the very last day of 1812. Its reception was not exceedingly enthusiastic; for Byron, borrowing most of his technique and general scheme from Scott, and joining with these greater apparent passion and a more novel and unfamiliar local colour, had appeared on the scene as a 'second lion.' The public, a 'great-sized monster of ingratitudes,' had got accustomed to Scott, if not weary of him. The title[12] was not very happy; and perhaps some harm was really done by one of the best of Moore's many good jokes in the Twopenny Postbag, where he represented Scott as coming from Edinburgh to London

'To do all the gentlemen's seats by the way'

in romances of half a dozen cantos.

The poem, however, is a very delightful one, and to some tastes at least very far above the Lady of the Lake. Scott, indeed, clung to the uninterrupted octosyllable more than ever; but that verse, if a poet knows how to manage it, is by no means so unsuited for story-telling as Ellis thought; and Scott had here more story to tell than in any of his preceding pieces, except Marmion. The only character, indeed, in which one takes much interest is Bertram Risingham; but he is a really excellent person, the cream of Scott's ruffians, whether in prose or verse; appearing well, conducting himself better, and ending best of all. Nor is Oswald, the contrasted villain, by any means to be despised; while the passages—on which the romance, in contradistinction to the classical epic, stands or falls—are equal to all but the very best in Marmion or the Lay. Bertram's account of the first and happier events at Marston Moor, as well as of his feelings as to his comradeship with Mortham; the singularly beautiful opening of the second canto—

'Far in the chambers of the west';

with the description of Upper Teesdale; Bertram's clamber on the cliff, with its reminiscences of the 'Kittle Nine Steps,'—these lead on to many other things as good, ending with that altogether admirable bit of workmanship, Bertram's revenge on Oswald and his own death. Matilda is one of the best of Scott's verse-heroines, except Constance—that is to say, the best of his good girls—and she has the interest of being avowedly modelled on 'Green Mantle.' Nor in any of the poems do the lyrics give more satisfactory setting-off to the main text. Indeed, it may be questioned whether any contains such a garland as—to mention only the best—is formed by

'O, Brignall banks are wild and fair';

the exquisite

'A weary lot is thine, fair maid,'

adapted from older matter with a skill worthy of Burns himself; the capital bravura of Allen-a-Dale; and that noble Cavalier lyric—

'When the dawn on the mountain was misty and grey.'

The Bridal of Triermain was published in 1813, not long after Rokeby, and, like that poem, drew its scenery from the North of England; but in circumstances, scale, and other ways it forms a pair with Harold the Dauntless, and they had best be noticed together.

The Lord of the Isles, the last of the great quintet, appeared in December 1814. Scott had obtained part of the scenery for it in an earlier visit to the Hebrides, and the rest in his yachting voyage (see below) with the Commissioners of Northern Lights, which also gave the decor for The Pirate. The poem was not more popular than Rokeby in England, and it was even less so in Scotland, chiefly for the reason, only to be mentioned with all but silent amazement, that it was 'not bitter enough against England.' Its faults are, of course, obvious enough. Central story there is simply none; the inconvenience that arises to the hero from his being addressed by two young ladies cannot awake any very sympathetic tear, nor does either Edith of Lorn or Isabel Bruce awaken any violent desire to offer to relieve him of one of them. The versification, however, is less uniform than that of Rokeby or The Lady of the Lake, and there are excellent passages—the best being, no doubt, the Abbot's extorted blessing on the Bruce; the great picture of Loch Coruisk, which, let people say what they will, is marvellously faithful; part of the voyage (though one certainly could spare some of the 'merrilys'); the landing in Carrick; the rescue of the supposed page; and, finally, Bannockburn, which even Jeffrey admired, though its want of 'animosity' shocked him.

The two last of the great poems—there was indeed a third, The Field of Waterloo, written hastily for a subscription, and not worthy either of Scott or of the subject—have not by any means the least interest, either intrinsic or that of curiosity. Indeed, as a matter of liking, not quite disjoined from criticism, I should put them very high indeed. Both were issued anonymously, and with indications intended to mislead readers into the idea that they were by Erskine; the intention being, it would seem, partly to ascertain how far the author's mere name counted in his popularity, partly also to 'fly kites' as to the veering of the public taste in reference to the verse romance in general. By the time of the publication of Harold the Dauntless in 1817, Scott could hardly have had any intention of deserting the new way—his own exclusive right—in which he was already walking firmly. But the Bridal of Triermain appeared very shortly after Rokeby, and was, no doubt, seriously intended as a test.

In both pieces the author fell back upon his earlier scheme of metre, the Christabel blend of iambic with anapaestic passages, instead of the nearly pure iambs of his middle poems. The Bridal, partly to encourage the Erskine notion, it would seem, is hampered by an intermixed outline-story, told in the introductions, of the wooing and winning of a certain Lucy by a certain Arthur, both of whom may be very heartily wished away. But the actual poem is more thoroughly a Romance of Adventure than even the Lay, has much more central interest than that poem, and is adorned by passages of hardly less beauty than the best of the earlier piece. It is astonishing how anyone of the slightest penetration could have entertained the slightest doubt about the authorship of

'Come hither, come hither, Henry my page, Whom I saved from the sack of Hermitage';

still more of that of the well-known opening of the Third Canto, one of the triumphs of that 'science of names' in which Scott was such a proficient—

'Bewcastle now must keep the Hold, Speir-Adam's steeds must bide in stall, Of Hartley-burn the bowmen bold Must only shoot from battled wall; And Liddesdale may buckle spur, And Teviot now may belt the brand, Tarras and Ewes keep nightly stir, And Eskdale foray Cumberland!'

But these are only the most unmistakable, not the best. The opening specification of the Bride; the admirable 'Lyulph's Tale,' with the first appearance of the castle, and the stanza (suggested no doubt by a famous picture) of the damsels dragging Arthur's war-gear; the courtship, and Guendolen's wiles to retain Arthur, and the parting; the picture of the King's court; the tournament; all these are good enough. But I am not sure that the description of Sir Roland's tantalised vigil in the Vale of St. John, with the moonlit valley (itself a worthy pendant even to the Melrose), and the sudden and successful revelation of the magic hold when the knight flings his battle-axe, does not even surpass the Tale. Nor do I think that the actual adventures of this Childe Roland in the dark towers are inferior. The trials and temptations are of stock material, but all the best matter is stock, and this is handled with a rush and dash which more than saves it. I hope the tiger was only a magic tiger, and went home comfortably with the damsels of Zaharak. It seems unfair that he should be actually killed. But this is the only thing that disquiets me; and it is impossible to praise too much De Vaux's ingenious compromise between tasteless asceticism and dangerous indulgence in the matter of 'Asia's willing maids.'

Harold the Dauntless is much slighter, as indeed might be expected, considering that it was finished in a hurry, long after the author had given up poetry as a main occupation. But the half burlesque Spenserians of the overture are very good; the contrasted songs, 'Dweller of the Cairn' and 'A Danish Maid for Me,' are happy. Harold's interview with the Chapter is a famous bit of bravura; and all concerning the Castle of the Seven Shields, from the ballad introducing it, through the description of its actual appearance (in which, by the way, Scott shows almost a better grasp of the serious Spenserian stanza than anywhere else) to the final battle of Odin and Harold, is of the very best Romantic quality. Perhaps, indeed, it is because (as the Critical Review, the Abdiel of 'classical' orthodoxy among the reviews of the time, scornfully said), 'both poems are romantic enough to satisfy all the parlour-boarders of all the ladies' schools in England,' that they are so pleasant. It is something, in one's grey and critical age, to feel genuine sympathy with the parlour-boarder.

The chapter has already stretched to nearly the utmost proportions compatible with the scale of this little book, and we must not indulge in very many critical remarks on the general character of the compositions discussed in it. But I have never carried out the plan (which I think indispensable) of reading over again whatever work, however well known, one has to write about, with more satisfaction. The main defects lie on the surface. Despite great felicities of a certain kind, these poems have no claim to formal perfection, and occasionally sin by very great carelessness, if not by something worse. The poet frankly shows himself as one whose appeal is not that of 'jewels five words long,' set and arranged in phrases of that magical and unending beauty which the very greatest poets of the world command. His effect, even in description, is rather of mass than of detail. He does not attempt analysis in character, and only skirts passion. Although prodigal enough of incident, he is very careless of connected plot. But his great and abiding glory is that he revived the art, lost for centuries in England, of telling an interesting story in verse, of riveting the attention through thousands of lines of poetry neither didactic nor argumentative. And of his separate passages, his patches of description and incident, when the worst has been said of them, it will remain true that, in their own way and for their own purpose, they cannot be surpassed. The already noticed comparison of any of Scott's best verse-tales with Christabel, which they formally imitated to some extent, and with the White Doe of Rylstone, which followed them, will no doubt show that Coleridge and Wordsworth had access to mansions in the house of poetry where Scott is never seen. But in some respects even their best passages are not superior to his; and as tales, as romances, his are altogether superior to theirs.

FOOTNOTES:

[12] It is fair to him to say that he made no public complaints, and that when some gutter-scribbler in 1810 made charges of plagiarism from him against Scott, he furnished Southey with the means of clearing him from all share in the matter (Lockhart, iii. 293; Southey's Life and Correspondence, iii. 291). But there is a suspicion of fretfulness even in the Preface to Christabel; and the references to Scott's poetry (not to himself) in the Table Talk, etc., are almost uniformly disparaging. It is true that these last are not strictly evidence.

[13] The objection taken to this word by precisians seems to ignore a useful distinction. The antiquary is a collector; the antiquarian a student or writer. The same person may be both; but he may not.

[14] Waverley, chap. vi. It owes a little to Smollett's Introduction to Humphry Clinker, but as usual improves the loan greatly.

[15] Inasmuch as he himself was secretary to the Commission which did away with it.

[16] Taken from the name of his friend Morritt's place on the Greta.



CHAPTER IV

THE NOVELS, FROM WAVERLEY TO REDGAUNTLET

In the opening introduction to the collected edition of the novels, Scott has given a very full account of the genesis of Waverley. These introductions, written before the final inroad had been made on his powers by the united strength of physical and moral misfortune, animated at once by the last glow of those powers, and by the indefinable charm of a fond retrospection, displaying every faculty in autumn luxuriance, are so delightful that they sometimes seem to be the very cream and essence of his literary work in prose. Indeed, I have always wondered why they have not been published separately as a History of the Waverley Novels by their author. Yet the public, I believe, with what I fear must be called its usual lack of judgment in some such matters, seems never to have read them very widely. An exception, however, may possibly have been made in the case of this first one, opening as it has long done every new issue of the whole set of novels. At anyrate, in one way or another, it is probably known, at least to those who take an interest in Scott, that he had begun Waverley and thrown it aside some ten years before its actual appearance, at a time when he was yet a novice in literature. He had also attempted one or two other things,—a completion of Strutt's Queenhoo Hall, the beginning of a tale about Thomas the Rhymer, etc., which are now appended to the introduction itself,—and he had once, in 1810, resumed Waverley, and again thrown it aside. At last, when his supremacy as a popular poet was threatened by Byron, and when, perhaps, he himself was a little wearying of the verse tale, he discovered the fragment while searching for fishing-tackle in the old desk where he had put it, and after a time resolved to make a new and anonymous attempt on public favour.

By the time—1814—when the book actually appeared, considerable changes, both for good and for bad, had occurred in Scott's circumstances; and the total of his literary work, independently of the poems mentioned in the last chapter, had been a good deal increased. Ashestiel had been exchanged for Abbotsford; the new house was being planned and carried out so as to become, if not exactly a palace, something much more than the cottage which had been first talked of; and the owner's passion for buying, at extravagant prices, every neighbouring patch of mostly thankless soil that he could get hold of was growing by indulgence. He himself, in 1811 and the following years, was extremely happy and extremely busy, planting trees, planning rooms, working away at Rokeby and Triermain in the general sitting-room of the makeshift house, with hammering all about him (now, the hammer and the pen are perhaps of all manual implements the most deadly and irreconcilable foes!), corresponding with all sorts and conditions of men; furnishing introductions and contributions (in some cases never yet collected) to all sorts and conditions of books, and struggling, as best he saw his way, though the way was unfortunately not the right one, with the ever-increasing difficulties of Ballantyne & Company. I forget whether there is any evidence that Dickens consciously took his humorous incarnation of the duties of a 'Co.' from Scott's own experience. But Scott as certainly had to provide the money, the sense, the good-humour, and the rest of the working capital as Mark Tapley himself. The merely pecuniary part of these matters may be left to the next chapter; it is sufficient to say that, aggravated by misjudgment in the selection and carrying out of the literary part, it brought the firm in 1814 exceedingly near the complete smash which actually happened ten years later. One is tempted to wish that the crash had come, for it was only averted by the alliance with Constable which was the cause of the final downfall. Also, it would have come at a time when Scott was physically better able to bear it; it could hardly in any degree have interfered with the appearance of Waverley and its followers; and it would have had at least a chance of awakening their author to a sense of the double mistake of engaging his credit in directly commercial concerns, and of sinking his money in land and building. However, things were to be as they were, and not otherwise.

How anxious Constable must have been to recover Scott (Hunter, the stone of stumbling, was now removed by death) is evident from the mere list of the titles of the books which he took over in whole or part from the Ballantynes. Even his Napoleonic audacity quailed before the Edinburgh Annual Register, with its handsome annual loss of a thousand a year, at Brewster's Persian Astronomy, in 4to and 8vo, and at General Views of the County of Dumfries. But he saddled himself with a good deal of the 'stock' (which in this case most certainly had not its old sense of 'assets'), and in May 1813, Scott seems to have thought that if John Ballantyne would curb his taste for long-dated bills, things might go well. Unluckily, John did not choose to do so, and Scott, despite the warning, was equally unable to curb his own for peat-bogs, marl-pits, the Cauldshiels Loch, and splendid lots of ancient armour. By July there was again trouble, and in August things were so bad that they were only cleared by Scott's obtaining from the Duke of Buccleuch a guarantee for L4000. It was in consenting to this that the Duke expressed his approval of Scott's determination to refuse the Laureateship, which had been offered to him, and which, in consequence of his refusal and at his suggestion, was conferred upon Southey. Even the guarantee, though it did save the firm, saved it with great difficulty.

In the following winter Scott had an adventure with his eccentric German amanuensis, Henry Weber, who had for some time been going mad, and who proposed a duel with pistols (which he produced) to his employer in the study at Castle Street. Swift appeared at last in the summer, and it was in June 1814 that the first of a series of wonderful tours de force was achieved by the completion, in about three weeks, of the last half of Waverley. One of the most striking things in Lockhart is the story of the idle apprentice who became industrious by seeing Scott's hand traversing the paper hour after hour at his study window. The novel actually appeared on July 7, and, being anonymous, made no immediate 'move,' as booksellers say, before Scott set off a fortnight later for his long-planned tour with the Commissioners of Northern Lights—the Scottish Trinity House—in their yacht, round the northern half of the island and to Orkney and Shetland. To abstract his own admirable account of the tour[27] would be a task grateful neither to writer nor to reader, the latter of whom, if he does not know it already, had better lose no time in making its acquaintance. On the return in September, Scott was met by two pieces of bad and good tidings respectively—the death of the Duchess of Buccleuch, and the distinct, though not as yet 'furious,' success of his novel.

There is no doubt that the early fragments in tale-telling which have been noticed above do not display any particular skill in the art; nor is there much need to quarrel with those who declare that the opening of Waverley[26] itself ranks little, if at all, above them. I always read it myself; but I believe most people plunge almost at once into the Tullyveolan visit. By doing so, however, they miss not merely the critical pleasure of comparing a man's work (as can rarely be done) during his period of groping for the way, with his actual stumble into it for the first time, but also such justification as there is for the hero's figure. Nobody ever judged the unlucky captain of Gardiner's better than his creator, who at the time frankly called him 'a sneaking piece of imbecility,' and avowed, with as much probability as right, that 'if he had married Flora, she would have set him up on the chimney-piece, as Count Borowlaski's[25] wife used to do.' But his weaknesses have at least an excuse from his education and antecedents, which does not appear if these antecedents are neglected.

Still, the story-interest only begins when Waverley rides into the bear-warded avenue; it certainly never ceases till the golden image of the same totem is replaced in the Baron of Bradwardine's hand. And it is very particularly to be observed that this interest is of a kind absolutely novel in combination and idiosyncrasy. The elements of literary interest are nowhere new, except in what is, for aught we know, accidentally the earliest literature to us. They are all to be found in Homer, in the Book of Job, in the Agamemnon, in the Lancelot, in the Poem of the Cid. But from time to time, in the hands of the men of greater genius, they are shaken up afresh, they receive new adjustments, and a touch of something personal which transforms them. This new adjustment and touch produced in Scott's case what we call the Historical Novel.[24] It is quite a mistake to think that he was limited to this. Guy Mannering and The Antiquary among the earlier novels, St. Ronan's Well and the exquisite introductory sketch to the Chronicles of the Canongate among the later, would disprove that. But the historical novel was the new kind that he was 'born to introduce,' after many failures in many generations. It is difficult to say whether it was accident or property which made his success in it co-existent with his success in depicting national character, scenery, and manners. Attempts at this, not always unsuccessful attempts, had indeed been made before. It had been tried frequently, though usually in the sense of caricature, on the stage; it had been done quite recently in the novel by Miss Edgeworth (whom Scott at least professed to regard as his governess here), and much earlier in this very department of Scotch matters by Smollett. But it had never been done with really commanding ability on the great scale.

In Waverley Scott supplied these two aspects, the historical-romantic and the national-characteristic, with a felicity perhaps all the more unerring in that it seems to have been only partly conscious. The subject of 'the Forty-five' was now fully out of taboo, and yet retained an interest more than antiquarian. The author had the amplest stores of knowledge, and that sympathy which is so invaluable to the artist when he keeps it within the limits of art. He seems to have possessed by instinct (for there was nobody to teach him) the paramount secret of the historical novelist, the secret of making his central and prominent characters fictitious, and the real ones mostly subsidiary. On the other hand, the knowledge of his native country, which he had been accumulating for almost the whole of his nearly four-and-forty years of life, was joined in him with that universal knowledge of humanity which only men of the greatest genius have. I am, indeed, aware that both these positions have been attacked. I was much pleased, some time after I had begun to write this little book, to find in a review of the present year of grace these words: 'Scott only knew a small portion of human nature, and he was unable to portray the physiognomy of the past.' I feared at first that this might be only one of the numerous flings of our young barbarians, a pleasant, or pleasantly intended, flirt of the heels of the New Humour. But the context showed that the writer was in deadly earnest. I shall not attempt here to explain to him, in a popular or any other style, that he is, perhaps, not quite right. Life itself is not long enough—'little books' are decidedly too short—for a demonstration that the Pacific Ocean is not really a small portion of the terrestrial water-space, or that Alexander was able to overrun foreign countries. We may find a little room in the Conclusion to say something more about Scott's range and his faculty. Here it will be enough to wear our friend's rue with a slight difference, and to say that Waverley and its successors showed in their author knowledge, complete in all but certain small parts, of human nature, and an almost unlimited faculty of portraying the physiognomy of the past.

It was scarcely to be expected that a book which was anonymous, and of which only a very few persons knew the real authorship, while even those who guessed it at all early were not so very many, should attain immediate popularity. Lockhart says that the slowness of the success was exaggerated, but his own figures prove that it was somewhat leisurely. Five editions, one (the second) of two thousand, the others of one thousand each, supplied the demand of the first six months, and a thousand copies more that of the next eighteen months—a difference from the almost instantaneous myriads of the poems, quite sufficient to show very eloquently how low the prose novel then stood in popular favour. It is the greatest triumph of Scott, from this low point of view, that his repeated blows heated the public as they did, till at the fourth publication, within but a year or two, Constable actually dared to start with ten thousand copies at once, and they were all absorbed in no time.

Scott had always been a rapid worker, but it was only now, under the combined stimulus of the new-found gift, the desire for more land and a statelier Abbotsford, and the pressure of the affairs of Ballantyne & Co., that he began to work at the portentous rate which, though I do not believe that it at all injured the quality of his production, pretty certainly endangered his health. During 1814 he had written nearly all his Life of Swift, nearly all Waverley, the Lord of the Isles, and an abundance of 'small wares,' essays, introductions, and what not. The major part of Guy Mannering—perhaps the very best of the novels, for merit of construction and interest of detail—seems to have been written in less than a month, at the extreme end of this year and the beginning of 1815. The whole appears to have been done in six weeks, to 'shake himself free of Waverley'—probably the most gigantic exhibition of the 'hair of the dog' recorded in literature.

The donnee of this novel was furnished by a Dumfries surveyor of taxes, Mr. Train, the scenery by that early visit to Galloway, in the interest of the reverend toyer with sweetie-wives, which has been recorded. Other indebtedness, such as that of Hatteraick to the historical or legendary free-trader, Yawkins, and the like, has been traced. But the charm of the whole lies in none of these things, nor in all together, but in Scott's own fashion of working them up. Nothing at first could seem to be a greater contrast with Waverley than this tale. No big wars, no political hazards; but a double and tenfold portion of human nature and local colour. This last element had in the earlier book been almost entirely supplied by Tullyveolan and its master; for Fergus and the Highland scenes, good as they are, are not much more than a furbishing up of the poem-matter of this kind, especially in the Lady of the Lake. But here the supply of character was liberal and the variety of scenery extraordinary. We cannot judge the innovation fully now, but let anyone turn to the theatrical properties of Godwin and Holcroft, of Mrs. Radcliffe and 'Monk' Lewis, and he will begin to have a better idea of what Guy Mannering must have been to its first readers. As usual, the personages who head the dramatis personae are not the best. Bertram, though less of a nincompoop than Waverley, is not very much; Lucy is a less lively ange de candeur than Rose, and nothing else; and Julia's genteel-comedy missishness does not do much more than pair off with Flora's tragedy-queen air. 'Mannering, Guy, a Colonel returned from the Indies,' is, perhaps, also too fair a description of the player of the title-part.[23] But we trouble ourselves very little about these persons. As for characters, the author opens fire on us almost at the very first with Dominie Sampson and Meg Merrilees, and the hardly less excellent figure of Bertram's well-meaning booby of a father; gives us barely time to make their acquaintance before we meet Dandie Dinmont; brings up almost superfluous reinforcements with Mr. Pleydell, and throughout throws in Hatteraick and Glossin, Jock Jabos and his mistress, and Sir Robert Haslewood, the company at Kippletringan, and at the funeral, and elsewhere, in the most reckless spirit of literary lavishness. Nor is he less prodigal of incident and scene. The opening passage of Mannering's night-ride could not have been bettered if the painter had taken infinitely more pains. Bertram's walk and the skirmish with the prowlers are simply first-rate; the Edinburgh scenes have always excited admiration as the very best of their kind; and the various passages which lead to the working out of justice on Glossin and Hatteraick are not merely told with a gusto, but arranged with a craftsmanship, of which the latter is unfortunately less often present than the former in the author's later work. There is hardly any book of Scott's on which it is more tempting to dwell than this. Although the demand had not yet reached anything like its height, two thousand copies were sold in forty-eight hours, and five thousand in three months.

In March 1815 Scott went to London, and met two persons of distinction, the Regent and Lord Byron. There seems to be a little doubt whether George did or did not adapt the joke of the hanging judge, about 'checkmating this time,' to the authorship of the Waverley novels; but there is no doubt that he was very civil. With Byron Scott was at once on very good terms, for Scott was not the man to bear any grudge for the early fling in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers; and Byron, whatever his faults, 'had more of lion' in him than to be jealous of such a rival. The difference of their characters was such as to prevent them from being in the strict sense friends; and Scott's comparison of Byron, after the separation, to a peacock parted from the hen and lifting up his voice to tell the world about it, has a rather terribly far-reaching justice, both of moral and literary criticism, on that noble bard's whole life and conversation. But there were no little jealousies between them, and apparently some real liking.

This visit to London was extended to Brussels and Paris, with the result in verse of the already mentioned and not particularly happy Field of Waterloo, in prose of the interesting Paul's Letters to his Kinsfolk, an account of the tour. Both were published (the poem almost immediately, Paul not till the new year) after Scott's return to Abbotsford at the end of September; and he set to work during the later autumn on his third novel, The Antiquary. The book appeared in May 1816, at about the time of the death of Major John Scott, the last but one of the poet's surviving brothers. It was not at first so popular as Guy Mannering, which, however, it very rapidly caught up even in that respect: nor is this bad start surprising. To good judges nowadays the book appeals as strongly at least as any other of its author's—in fact, Monkbarns and the Mucklebackits, the rescue of Sir Arthur and Isabel, the scenes in the ruins of St. Ruth's, and especially Edie Ochiltree, were never surpassed by him. But the story was a daring innovation, or return, among the novels of its own day. It boldly rejected most of the ordinary sources of romance interest. It had very little plot; its humorous characters, though touched with the rarest art, were not caricatured; and (for which it certainly cannot be praised) that greatest fault of Scott's,—perhaps his only great fault as a novelist,—the 'huddling up' of the end, appears in it for the first, though unluckily by no means for the last, time. But it would have been a very sad thing for the public taste if it had definitely refused The Antiquary. A book which contains within the compass of the opening chapters such masterpieces as the journey to the Hawes, the description of the Antiquary's study, and the storm and rescue, must have had a generation of idiots for an audience if it had not been successful. Moreover, it had, as Scott's unwearied biographer has already noted, a new and special source of interest in the admirable fragmentary mottoes, invented to save the greater labour of discovery, which adorn its chapter-headings.[22] Lockhart himself thought that Scott never quite equalled these first three novels. I cannot agree with him there; but what is certain is that he in them discovered, with extraordinary felicity, skill in three different kinds of novel—the historical, the romantic-adventurous, and that of ordinary or almost wholly ordinary life; and that even he never exactly added a fourth kind to his inventions, though he varied them wonderfully within themselves. The romance partly historical, the romance mainly or wholly fictitious, and the novel of manners; these were his three classes, and hardly any others.

It is not entirely explained what were the reasons which determined Scott to make his next venture, the Tales of my Landlord, under a fresh pseudonym, and also to publish it not with Constable, but with Murray and Blackwood. Lockhart's blame of John Ballantyne may not be unfair; but it is rather less supported by documentary evidence than most of his strictures on the Ballantynes. And the thing is perhaps to be sufficiently accounted for by Scott's double dislike, both as an independent person and a man of business, of giving a monopoly of his work to one publisher, and by his constant fancy for trying experiments on the public—a fancy itself not wholly, though partially, comprehensible. As a matter of fact, Old Mortality and the Black Dwarf were offered to and pretty eagerly accepted by Murray and Blackwood, on the terms of half profits and the inevitable batch of 'old stock.' The story of the unlucky quarrel with Blackwood in consequence of some critical remarks of his on the end of the Black Dwarf,—remarks certainly not inexcusable,—and of Scott's famous letter in reply, will doubtless receive further elucidation in the forthcoming chronicle of the House of 'Ebony'; but it is told with fair detail, in the second edition of Lockhart, from the actual archives.

Scott doubled his work during the summer and autumn by undertaking the historical department, relinquished by Southey, of the Edinburgh Annual Register, yet the two Tales were ready in November, and appeared on the 1st of December 1816. Murray wrote effusively to Scott (who, it must be remembered, was not even to his publishers the known author), and received a very amusing reply, from which one sentence may be quoted as an example of those which have brought upon Sir Walter the reproach of falsehood, or at least disingenuousness, from Goodman Dull. 'I assure you,' he writes, 'I have never read a volume of them till they were printed,' a delightful selection of words, for it looks decisive, and means absolutely nothing. Nobody but a magician, and no ordinary magician, could read a volume (which in the usual parlance means a printed volume) before it was printed. To back his disclaimer, Scott offered to review himself in the Quarterly, which he did. I certainly do not approve of authors being their own reviewers; though when (as sometimes happens) they have any brains, they probably know the faults and merits of their books better than anyone else, and can at anyrate state, with a precision which is too rare in the ordinary critic, what the book is meant to be and tries to do. But this case was clearly one out of the common way, and rather part of an elaborate practical joke than anything else.

Dulness, however, had in many ways found stumbling-blocks in the first foster-children of the excellent Jedediah. The very pious and learned, if not exactly humorous or shrewd, Dr. M'Crie, fell foul of the picture of the Covenanters given in Old Mortality. No one who knows the documents is likely to agree with him now, and from hardly any point of view but his could the greatness of the book be denied. Although Scott's humour is by no means absent from it, that quality does not perhaps find quite such an opportunity, even in Mause and Cuddie, as in the Baron, and the Dominie, and the inhabitants of Monkbarns. But as a historical novel, it is a far greater one than Waverley. Drumclog, the siege of Tillietudlem, above all, the matchless scene where Morton is just saved from murder by his own party, surpass anything in the earlier book. But greater than any of these single things is one of the first and the greatest of Scott's splendid gallery of romantic-historic portraits, the stately figure of Claverhouse. All the features which he himself was to sum up in that undying sentence of Wandering Willie's Tale later are here put in detail and justified.

As for the companion to this masterly book, I have always thought the earlier part of the Black Dwarf as happy as all but the best of Scott's work. But the character of the Dwarf himself was not one that he could manage. The nullity of Earnscliff and Isabel is complete. Isabel's father is a stagy villain, or rather rascal (for Victor Hugo's antithesis between scelerat and maroufle comes in here), and even Scott has never hustled off a conclusion with such complete insouciance as to anything like completeness. Willie of Westburnflat here, like Christie of the Clinthill later, is one of our old friends of the poems back again, and welcome back again. But he and Hobbie can hardly save a book which Scott seems to have thrown in with its admirable companion, not as a makeweight, but rather as a foil.

Between the first and the second sets of Tales, the 'Author of Waverley,' true to his odd design of throwing the public off the scent, reappeared, and the result was Rob Roy. Perhaps because it was written under the first attacks of that 'cramp of the stomach' which, though obscurely connected with his later and more fatal ailments, no doubt ushered them in something more than an accidental manner, Scott did not at first much like Rob. But he was reconciled later; and hardly anybody else (except those exceedingly unhappy persons who cannot taste him at all) can ever have had any doubt about it. That the end is even more than usually huddled, that the beginning may perhaps have dawdled a little over commercial details (I do not think so myself, but Lady Louisa Stuart did), and that the distribution of time, which lingers over weeks and months before and after it devotes almost the major part of the book to the events of forty-eight hours, is irregular, even in the eyes of those who are not serfs to the unities, cannot be denied. But almost from the introduction of Frank to Diana, certainly from his setting off in the grey of the morning with Andrew Fairservice, to the point at least where the heroine stoops from her pony in a manner equally obliging and graceful, there is no dropped stitch, no false note. Nor in any book are there so many of Scott's own characters, and others not quite so much his own. Helen Macgregor, perhaps, does not 'thrill our blood and overpower our reason,' as she did Lady Louisa's, simply because we were born some hundred years later than that acute and accomplished granddaughter of Lady Mary; and Rashleigh pretty frequently, Rob himself now and then, may also savour to us a little of the boards and the sawdust. But, as a rule, Rob does not; and for nobody else, not even for the fortunate Frank,—who has nothing to do but to walk through his part creditably, and does it,—need any allowance be made. The Bailie is, with Shallow, his brother justice (upon whom he justly looks down, but to whom he is, I think, kind) in Arthur's bosom; Andrew Fairservice and the Dougal creature, Justice Inglewood and Sir Hildebrand, are there too. As for Die Vernon, she is the one of Scott's heroines with whom one has to fall in love, just as, according to a beautiful story, a thoughtless and reluctant world had to believe the Athanasian Creed. It is painful to say that persons on whom it is impossible to retort the charge, have sometimes insinuated a touch of vulgarity in Di. For these one can but pray; and, after all, they are usually of her sex, which in such judgments of itself counts not. All men, who are men and gentlemen, must delight in her. And here, as always, to all but the very last, even in the twilight of Anne of Geierstein, the succession of scenes hurries the reader along without breath or time to stop and criticise, with nothing to do, if he is a reasonable person, but to read and enjoy and admire.

Lockhart has taken the opportunity of this point of time (1817-1818), which may be said to mark the zenith of Scott's prosperity, if not of his fame, to halt and to give a sort of survey of his father-in-law's private life at Castle Street and at Abbotsford. It forms one of the pleasantest portions of his book, containing nothing more tragic than the advent of the famous American tragedy of The Cherokee Lovers, which its careful author sent, that Scott might approve and publish it, in duplicate, so that the unfortunate recipient had to pay five pounds twice over for the postage of the rubbish. Of course things were not entirely as they seemed. The cramps with which, as mentioned, Scott had been already seized, during the progress of Rob Roy, were, though probably not caused, yet all too much helped and hastened, by the ferocious manner in which he worked his brains. For it must be doubted whether social intercourse, or even bodily exercise in company with others, is really the best refreshment after very severe mental labour. Both distract and amuse; but they do not refresh, relax, relieve, like a bath of pure solitude.

Divers events of importance happened to Scott, in the later course of the year 1818[21] (besides a much worse recurrence of his disorder), after the Heart of Midlothian (the second series of the Tales) had been published in June, and the Bride of Lammermoor (the third series) had been begun. The Duke of Buccleuch, his chief, his (as he would himself have cheerfully allowed) patron, his helper in time of need, and his most intimate friend, died. So did his brother-in-law, Charles Carpenter, this latter death adding considerably, though to an extent exaggerated at first and only reversionary, to the prospects of Scott's children. He gave up an idea, which he had for some time held, of obtaining a judgeship of the Scotch Exchequer; but he received his baronetcy in April 1820. Abbotsford went on gradually and expensively completing itself; the correspondence which tells us so much and is such delightful reading continued, as if the writer had nothing else to write and nothing else to do. But for us the chief matters of interest are the two novels mentioned, and that admirable supplement to the second of them, the Legend of Montrose.

There can be little doubt, I think, that in at least passages, and those very large ones, of the Heart of Midlothian, Scott went as high as he ever had done, or ever did thereafter. I have never agreed with Lady Louisa Stuart that 'Mr. Saddletree is not amusing,' nor that there is too much Scots law for English readers. It must be remembered that until Scott opened people's eyes, there were some very singular conventions and prejudices, even in celestial minds, about novels. Technical details were voted tedious and out of place—as, Heaven knows! M. Zola and others have shown us since, that they may very easily be made. Professional matters, the lower middle classes, etc., were thought 'low,' as Goldsmith's audience had had it, 'vulgar,' as Madame de Stael said of Miss Austen. That the farrago of the novelist's book is absolutely universal and indiscriminate, provided only that he knows what to do with it, had not dawned on the general mind. On the other hand, Lady Louisa was right in objecting to the finale,—it has been admitted that Scott was never good at a conclusion,—and personally I have always thought George Staunton uninteresting throughout. But how much does this leave! The description of the lynching of Porteous and the matchless interview with Queen Caroline are only the very best of such a series of good things that, except just at the end, it may be said to be uninterrupted. Jeanie it is unnecessary to praise; the same Lady Louisa's admiration of the wonderful art which could attract so much interest to a plain, good, not clever, almost middle-aged woman sums up all. But almost everyone plays up to Jeanie in perfection—her father and, to no small extent, her sister, her husband and Dumbiedykes, Madge Wildfire (a most difficult and most successful character) and her old fiend of a mother, the Duke and the tobacco-shop keeper. Abundant as are the good things afterwards, I do not know that Scott ever showed his actual original genius, his faculty of creation and combination, to such an extent and in such proportion again.

He certainly did not, so far as my taste goes, in The Bride of Lammermoor, a book which, putting the mere fragment of the Black Dwarf aside, seems to me his first approach to failure in prose. Lockhart, whose general critical opinions deserve the profoundest respect, thought differently—thought it, indeed, 'the most pure and perfect of all the tragedies that Scott ever penned.' Perhaps there is something in this of the same ingenuity which Scott himself showed in his disclaimer to Murray quoted above, for tragedy per se was certainly not Scott's forte to the same extent as were comedy and history. But I know that there are many who agree with Lockhart. On the other hand, I should say that while we do not know enough of the House of Ravenswood to feel much sympathy with its fortunes as a house, the 'conditions,' in the old sense, of its last representative are not such as to attract us much to him personally. He is already far too much of that hero of opera which he was destined to become, a sulky, stagy creature, in theatrical poses and a black-plumed hat, who cannot even play the easy and perennially attractive part of desdichado so as to keep our compassion. Lucy is a simpleton so utter and complete that it is difficult even to be sorry for her, especially as Ravenswood would have made a detestable husband. The mother is meant to be and is a repulsive virago, and the father a time-serving and almost vulgar intriguer. Moreover—and all this is not in the least surprising, since he was in agonies during most of the composition, and nearly died before its close[20]—the author has, contrary to his wont, provided very few subsidiary characters to support or carry off the principals. Caleb Balderstone has been perhaps unduly objected to by the very persons who praise the whole book; but he is certainly somewhat of what the French call a charge. Bucklaw, though agreeable, is very slight; Craigengelt a mere 'super'; the Marquis shadowy. Even such fine things as the hags at the laying-out, and the visit of Lucy and her father to Wolf's Crag, and such amusing ones as Balderstone's fabliau-like expedients to raise the wind in the matter of food, hardly save the situation; and though the tragedy of the end is complete, it leaves me, I own, rather cold.[19] One is sorry for Lucy, but it was really her own fault—a Scottish maiden is not usually unaware of the possibilities and advantages of 'kilting her coats of green satin' and flying from the lad she does not love to the lad she does. The total disappearance of Edgar is the best thing that could happen to him, and the only really satisfactory point is Bucklaw's very gentlemanlike sentence of arrest on all impertinent questioners.

But if the companion of the first set of Tales was a dead-weight rather than a make-weight, the make-weight of the third would have atoned for anything. Sometimes I think, allowing for scale and conditions, that Scott never did anything much better than A Legend of Montrose. First, it is pervaded by the magnificent figure of Dugald Dalgetty. Secondly, the story, though with something of the usual huddle at the end, is interesting throughout, with the minor figures capitally sketched in. Menteith, though merely outlined, is a good fellow, a gentleman, and not a stick; Allan escapes the merely melodramatic; 'Gillespie Grumach' is masterly in his brief appearances; and Montrose himself seems to me to be brought in with a skill which has too often escaped notice. For it would mar the story to deal with the tragedy of his end, and his earlier history is a little awkward to manage. Moreover, that faculty of hurrying on the successive tableaux which is so conspicuous in most of Scott's work, and so conspicuously absent in the Bride (where there are long passages with no action at all) is eminently present here. The meeting with Dalgetty; the night at Darnlinvarach, from the bravado of the candlesticks to Menteith's tale; the gathering and council of the clans; the journey of Dalgetty, with its central point in the Inverary dungeon; the escape; and the battle of Inverlochy,—these form an exemplary specimen of the kind of interest which Scott's best novels possess as nothing of the kind had before possessed it, and as few things out of Dumas have possessed it since. Nor can the most fervent admirer of Chicot and of Porthos—I know none more fervent than myself—say in cool blood that their creator could have created Dalgetty, who is at once an admirable human being, a wonderful national type of the more eccentric kind, and the embodiment of an astonishing amount of judiciously adjusted erudition.

Many incidents of interest and some of importance occurred in Scott's private life between the date of 1818 and that of 1820, besides those mentioned already. One of these was the acquisition by Constable of the whole of his back-copyrights for the very large sum of twelve thousand pounds, a contract supplemented twice later in 1821 and 1823 by fresh purchases of rights as they accrued for nominal sums of eleven thousand pounds in addition. Unfortunately, this transaction, like almost all his later ones, was more fictitious than real. And though it was lucky that the publisher never discharged the full debt, so that when his bankruptcy occurred something was saved out of the wreck which would otherwise have been pure loss, the proceeding is characteristic of the mischievously unreal system of money transactions which brought Scott to ruin. Except for small things like review articles, etc., and for his official salaries, he hardly ever touched real money for the fifteen most prosperous years of his life, between 1810 and 1825. Promises to receive were interchanged with promises to pay in such a bewildering fashion that unless he had kept a chartered accountant of rather unusual skill and industry perpetually at work, it must have been utterly impossible for him to know at any given time what he had, what he owed, what was due to him, and what his actual income and expenditure were. The commonly accepted estimate is that during the most flourishing time, 1820-1825, he made about fifteen thousand a year, and on paper he probably did. Nor can he ever have spent, in the proper sense of the term, anything like that sum, for the Castle Street house cannot have cost, even with lavish hospitality, much to keep up, and the Abbotsford establishment, though liberal, was never ostentatious. But when large lump sums are constantly expended in purchases of land, building, furnishing, and the like; when every penny of income except official salaries goes through a complicated process of abatement in the way of discounts for six and twelve months' bills, fines for renewal, payments to banks for advances and the like—the 'clean' sums available at any given moment bear quite fantastic and untrustworthy relations to their nominal representatives. It may be strongly suspected, from the admitted decrease of a very valuable practice under Walter Scott pere, and from its practical disappearance under Thomas, that the genius of the Scott family did not precisely lie in the management of money.

The marriage of Sophia Scott to Lockhart, and the purchase of a commission for her eldest brother Walter in the 18th Hussars, made gaps in Scott's family circle, and also, beyond all doubt, in his finances. The first was altogether happy for him. It did not, for at anyrate some years, absolutely sever him from the dearest of his children, a lady who, to judge from her portraits, must have been of singular charm, and who seems to have been the only one of the four with much of his mental characteristics; it provided him with an agreeable companion, a loyal friend, and an incomparable biographer. Of Sir Walter Scott the second and last, not much personal idea is obtainable. The few anecdotes handed down, and his father's letters to him (we have no replies), suggest a good sort of person, slightly 'chuckle-headed' and perfervid in the wrong places, with next to no intellectual gifts, and perhaps more his mother's son than his father's. He had some difficulties in his first regiment, which seems to have been a wild one, and not in the best form; he married an heiress of the unpoetical name of Jobson, to whom and of whom his father writes with a pretty old-fashioned affection and courtesy, which perhaps gave Thackeray some traits for Colonel Newcome. Of the younger brother Charles, an Oxford man, who went into the Foreign Office, even less is recorded than of Walter. Anne Scott, the third of the family, and the faithful attendant of her father in his last evil days, died in her sister's house shortly after Sir Walter, and Mrs. Lockhart herself followed before the Life was finished. Scott can hardly be said to have bequeathed good luck to any of these his descendants.

It was at the end of 1819, after Walter the younger left home, and before Sophia's marriage, that the next in order of the Waverley Novels (now again such by title, and not Tales of my Landlord) appeared. This was Ivanhoe, which was published in a rather costlier shape than its forerunners, and yet sold to the extent of twelve thousand copies in its three-volume form. Lockhart, perhaps with one of the few but graceful escapes of national predilection (it ought not to be called prejudice) to be noticed in him, pronounces this a greater work of art, but a less in genius than its purely Scottish predecessors. As there is nothing specially English in Ivanhoe, but only an attempt to delineate Normans and Saxons before the final blend was formed, an Englishman may, perhaps, claim at least impartiality if he accepts the positive part of Lockhart's judgment and demurs to the negative. Although the worst of Scott's cramps were past, he was still in anything but good health when he composed the novel, most of which was dictated, not written; and his avocations and bodily troubles together may have had something to do with those certainly pretty flagrant anachronisms which have brought on Ivanhoe the wrath of Dryasdust. But Dryasdust is adeo negligibile ut negligibilius nihil esse possit, and the book is a great one from beginning to end. The mere historians who quarrel with it have probably never read the romances which justify it, even from the point of view of literary 'document.' The picturesque opening; the Shakespearean character of Wamba; the splendid Passage of Arms; the more splendid siege of Torquilstone; the gathering up of a dozen popular stories of the 'King-and-the-Tanner' kind into the episodes of the Black Knight and the Friar; the admirable, if a little conventional, sketch of Bois-Guilbert, the pendant in prose to Marmion; the more admirable contrast of Rebecca and Rowena; and the final Judgment of God, which for once vindicates Scott from the charge of never being able to wind up a novel,—with such subsidiary sketches as Gurth, Prior Aymer, Isaac, Front-de-Boeuf (Urfried, I fear, will not quite do, except in the final interview with her tempter-victim), Athelstane, and others—give such a plethora of creative and descriptive wealth as nobody but Scott has ever put together in prose. Even the nominal hero, it is to be observed, escapes the curse of most of Scott's young men (the young men to several of whom Thackeray would have liked to be mother-in-law), and if he is not worthy of Rebecca, he does not get her. As for Richard, no doubt, he is not the Richard of history, but what does that matter? He is a most admirable re-creation, softened and refined, of the Richard of a romance which, be it remembered, is itself in all probability as old as the thirteenth century.

After speaking frankly of the Bride of Lammermoor and of some others of Scott's works, it may perhaps be permissible to rate the successor to Ivanhoe rather higher than it was rated at the time, or than it has generally been rated since. The Monastery was at its appearance (March 1820) regarded as a failure; and quite recently a sincere admirer of Scott confided to a fellow in that worship the opinion that 'a good deal of it really is rot, you know.' I venture to differ. Undoubtedly it does not rank with the very best, or even next to them. In returning to Scottish ground, Scott may have strengthened himself on one side, but from the distance of the times and the obscure and comparatively uninteresting period which he selected (just after the strange and rapid panorama of the five Jameses and before the advent of Queen Mary), he lost as much as he gained. An intention, afterwards abandoned, to make yet a fresh start, and try a new double on the public by appearing neither as 'Author of Waverley' nor as Jedediah Cleishbotham, may have hampered him a little, though it gave a pleasant introduction. The supernatural part, though much better, as it seems to me, than is generally admitted, is no doubt not entirely satisfactory, being uncertainly handled, and subject to the warning of Nec deus intersit. There is some return of that superabundance of interval and inaction which has been noted in the Bride. And, above all, there appears here a fault which had not been noticeable before, but which was to increase upon Scott,—the fault of introducing a character as if he were to be of great pith and moment, and then letting his interest, as the vernacular says, 'tail off.' The trouble taken about Halbert by personages natural and supernatural promises the case of some extraordinary figure, and he is but very ordinary. Still, at the works of how many novelists except Scott should we grumble, if we had the admirable descriptions of Glendearg, the scenes in the Abbey, the night-ride of poor Father Philip, the escape from the Castle of Avenel, the passage of the interview of Halbert with Murray and Morton? Even the episode of Sir Piercie Shafton, though it is most indisputably true that Scott has not by any means truly represented Euphuism, is good and amusing in itself; while there are those who boldly like the White Lady personally. She is more futile than a sprite beseems; but she is distinctly 'nice.'

At any rate, nobody could (or indeed did) deny that the author, six months later, made up for any shortcoming in The Abbot, where, except the end (eminently of the huddled order), everything is as it should be. The heroine is, except Die Vernon, Scott's masterpiece in that kind, while all the Queen Mary scenes are unsurpassed in him, and rarely equalled out of him. Nor was there any falling off in Kenilworth (Jan. 1821), where he again shifted his scene to England. He has not indeed interested us very much personally in Amy Robsart, but as a hapless heroine she is altogether the superior of Lucy Ashton. The book is, among his, the 'novel without a hero,' and, considering his defects in that direction, this was hardly a drawback. It cannot be indeed said to have any one minor character which is a success of the first class. But the whole is interesting throughout. The journeys of Tressilian to Devonshire and of Amy and Wayland to Kenilworth have the curious attraction which Scott, a great traveller, and a lover of it, knew how to give to journeys, and the pageantry and Court scenes, at Greenwich and elsewhere, command admiration. Indeed, Kenilworth equals any of the novels in sustained variety of interest, and, unlike too many of them, it comes to a real end.

It was in 1821 that a book now necessarily much forgotten and even rare (it is comparatively seldom that one sees it in catalogues), Adolphus's Letters on the Author of Waverley, at once showed the interest taken in the identity of the 'Great Unknown,' and fixed it as being that of the author of the Lay, with a great deal of ingenuity and with a most industrious abundance of arguments, bad and good. After such a proof of public interest, neither Scott nor Constable could be much blamed for working what has been opprobriously called the 'novel manufactory' at the highest pressure; and The Pirate, The Fortunes of Nigel, Peveril of the Peak, Quentin Durward, St. Ronan's Well, and Redgauntlet were written and published in the closest succession. These books, almost all of wonderful individual excellence (Peveril, I think, is the only exception), and of still more wonderful variety, were succeeded, before the crash of 1825-26, by the Tales of the Crusaders, admirable in part, if not wholly. When we think that all these were, with some other work, accomplished in less than five years, it scarcely seems presumption in the author to have executed, or rashness in the bookseller to have suggested, a contract for four of them in a batch—a batch unnamed, unplanned, not even yet in embryo, but simply existing in potentia in the brain of Walter Scott himself.

In surveying together this batch, written when the first novelty of the novels was long over, and before there was any decadence, one obtains, as well perhaps as from any other division of his works, an idea of their author's miraculous power. Many novelists since have written as much or more in the same time. But their books for the most part, even when well above the average, popular, and deservedly popular too, leave next to no trace on the mind. You do not want to read them again; you remember, even with a strong memory, nothing special about their plots; above all, their characters take little or no hold on the mind in the sense of becoming part of its intellectual circle and range.

How different is it with these six or eight novels, 'written with as much care as the others, that is to say, with none at all,' as the author wickedly remarked! The Pirate (December 1821) leads off, its scenery rendered with the faithfulness of recent memory, and yet adjusted and toned by the seven years' interval since Scott yachted round Orkney and Shetland. Here are the admirable characters of Brenda (slight yet thoroughly pleasing), and her father, the not too melodramatic ones of Minna, Cleveland, and Norna, the triumph of Claud Halcro (to whom few do justice), and again, the excellent keeping of story and scenery to character and incident. The Fortunes of Nigel (May 1822) originated in a proposed series of 'Letters of the Seventeenth Century,' in which others were to take part, and perhaps marks a certain decline, though only in senses to be distinctly defined and limited. Nothing that Scott ever did is better than the portrait of King James, which, in the absence of one from the hand of His Majesty's actual subject for some dozen years, Mr. William Shakespeare of New Place, Stratford, is probably the most perfect thing of the kind that ever could have been or can be done. And the picture of Whitefriars, though it is borrowed to a great extent, and rather anticipated in point of time, from Shadwell's Squire of Alsatia, sixty or seventy years after date, is of the finest, whilst Sir Mungo Malagrowther[18] all but deserves the same description. But this most cantankerous knight is not touched off with the completeness of Dalgetty, or even of Claud Halcro. Lord Glenvarloch adds, to the insipidity which is the bane of Scott's good heroes, some rather disagreeable traits which none of them had hitherto shown. Dalgarno in the same way falls short of his best bad heroes. Dame Suddlechop suggests, for the first time unfavourably, a Shakespearean ancestress, Mistress Quickly, and the story halts and fails to carry the reader rapidly over the stony path. Even Richie Moniplies, even Gentle Geordie, good as both are, fall short of their predecessors. Ten years earlier The Fortunes of Nigel would have been a miracle, and one might have said, 'If a man begins like this, what will he do later?' Now, thankless and often uncritical as is the chatter about 'writing out,' we can hardly compare Nigel with Guy Mannering, or Rob Roy, or even The Abbot, and not be conscious of something that (to use a favourite quotation of Scott's own), 'doth appropinque an end,' though an end as yet afar off. The 'bottom of the sack,' as the French say, is a long way from us; but it is within measurable distance.

Even a friendly critic must admit that this distance seemed to be alarmingly shortened by Peveril of the Peak (January 1823), which among the full-sized novels seems to me quite his least good book, worse even than 'dotages,' as they are sometimes thought, like Anne of Geierstein and Count Robert. No one has defended the story, which, languid as it is, is made worse by the long gaps between the passages that ought to be interesting, and by a (for Scott) quite abnormal and portentous absence of really characteristic characters. Lockhart pleads for some of these, but I fear the plea can hardly be admitted. I imagine that those who read Scott pretty regularly are always sorely tempted to skip Peveril altogether, and that when they do read it, they find the chariot wheels drive with a heaviness of which elsewhere they are entirely unconscious.

But in the same year (1823), Quentin Durward not only made up for Peveril, but showed Scott's powers to be at least as great as when he wrote The Abbot, if not as great as ever. He has taken some liberties with history, but no more than he was perfectly entitled to take; he has paid the historic muse with ample interest for anything she lent him, by the magnificent sketch of Louis and the fine one of Charles; he has given a more than passable hero in Quentin, and a very agreeable if not ravishing heroine in Isabelle. Above all, he has victoriously shown his old faculty of conducting the story with such a series of enthralling, even if sometimes episodic passages, that nobody but a pedant of 'construction' would care to inquire too narrowly whether they actually make a whole. Quentin's meeting with the King and his rescue from Tristan by the archers; the interviews between Louis and Crevecoeur, and Louis and the Astrologer; the journey (another of Scott's admirable journeys); the sack of Schonwaldt, and the feast of the Boar of Ardennes; Louis in the lion's den at Peronne,—these are things that are simply of the first order. Nor need the conclusion, which has shocked some, shock any who do not hold, with critics of the Rymer school, that 'the hero ought always to be successful.' For as Quentin wins Isabelle at last, what more success need we want? and why should not Le Balafre, that loyal Leslie, be the instrument of his nephew's good fortune?

The recovery was perfectly well maintained in St. Ronan's Well (still 1823) and Redgauntlet (1824), the last novels of full length before the downfall. They were also, be it noticed, the first planned (while Quentin itself was completed) after some early symptoms of apoplectic seizure, which might, even if they had not been helped by one of the severest turns of fortune that any man ever experienced, have punished Scott's daring contempt of ordinary laws in the working of his brains.[17] The harm done to St. Ronan's Well by the author's submission to James Ballantyne's Philistine prudery in protesting against the original story (in which Clara did not discover the cheat put on her till a later period than the ceremony) is generally acknowledged. As it is, not merely is the whole thing made a much ado about nothing,—for no law and no Church in Christendom would have hesitated to declare the nullity of a marriage which had never been consummated, and which was celebrated while one of the parties took the other for some one else,—but Clara's shattered reason, Tyrrel's despair, and Etherington's certainty that he has the cards in his hand, are all incredible and unaccountable—mere mid-winter madness. Nevertheless, this, Scott's only attempt at actual contemporary fiction, has extraordinary interest and great merit as such, while Meg Dods would save half a dozen novels, and the society at the Well is hardly inferior.

And then came Redgauntlet. A great lover of Scott once nearly invoked the assistance of Captain M'Turk to settle matters with a friend of his who would not pronounce Redgauntlet the best of all the novels, and would only go so far as to admit that it contains some, and many, of the best things. The best as a novel it cannot be called, because the action is desultory in the extreme. There are wide gaps even in the chain of story interest that does exist, and the conclusion, admirable in itself, has even for Scott a too audacious disconnection with any but the very faintest concern of the nominally first personages. But even putting 'Wandering Willie's Tale' aside, and taking for granted the merits of that incomparable piece (of which, it may yet be gently hinted, it was not so very long ago still a singularity and mark of daring to perceive the absolute supremacy), the good things in this fascinating book defy exaggeration. The unique autobiographic interest—so fresh and keen and personal, and yet so free from the odious intrusion of actual personality—of the earlier epistolary presentment of Saunders and Alan Fairford, of Darsie and Green Mantle; Peter Peebles, peer of Scott's best; Alan's journey and Darsie's own wanderings; the scenes at the Provost's dinner-table and in Tam Turnpenny's den; that unique figure, the skipper of the Jumping Jenny; the extraordinarily effective presentment of Prince Charles, already in his decadence, if not yet in his dotage; the profusion of smaller sketches and vignettes everywhere grouped round the mighty central triumph of the adventures of Piper Steenie,—who but Scott has done such things? He never put so much again in a single book. There is something in it which it is hardly fanciful to take as a 'note of finishing,' as the last piece of the work, that, gigantic as it was, was not exactly collar work, not sheer hewing of wood and drawing of water for the taskmasters. And it was fitting that the book, so varied, so fresh, so gracious and kindly, so magnificent in part, with a magnificence dominating Scott's usual range, should begin with the beginnings of his own career, and should end with the practical finish, not merely of the good days, but of the days that dawned with any faint promise of goodness, in the career of the last hope of the Jacobite cause.

FOOTNOTES:

[17] Lockhart, iv. chaps. xxviii.-xxxiii.

[18] The name, which, as many people now know since Aldershot Camp was established, is a real one, had been already used with the double meaning by Charlotte Smith, a now much-forgotten novelist, whom Scott admired.

[19] The once celebrated 'Polish dwarf.'

[20] I may be permitted to refer—as to a piece justificatif which there is no room here to give or even abstract in full—to a set of three essays on this subject in my Essays in English Literature. Second Series. London, 1895.

[21] This part, however, has a curious adventitious interest, owing to the idea—fairly vouched for—that Scott intended to delineate in the Colonel some points of his own character. His pride, his generosity, and his patronage of the Dominie, are not unrecognisable, certainly. And a man's idea of himself is often, even while strange to others, perfectly true to his real nature.

[22] All who do not skip such things must have enjoyed these scraps, sometimes labelled particularly, sometimes merely dubbed 'Old Play'; and they are well worth reading together, as they appear in the editions of the Poems. At the same time, they have been, in some cases, too hastily attributed to Sir Walter himself. For instance, that in The Legend of Montrose, ch. xiv., assigned to The Tragedy of Brennoralt (not 'valt,' as misprinted), is really from Sir John Suckling's sententious play (act iv. sc. 1), though loosely quoted.

[23] In the earlier months had taken place that famous rediscovery of the Regalia of Scotland in Edinburgh Castle, which was one of the central moments of Scott's life, and in which, as afterwards in the restoring of Mons Meg, he took a great, if not the chief, part. His influence with George IV. as Prince and King had much to do with both, and in the earlier he took the very deepest interest. The effect on himself (and on his daughter Sophia) of the actual finding of the Crown jewels is a companion incident to that previously noticed (p. 52) as occurring on the Mound. Those who cannot sympathise with either can hardly hope to understand either Scott or his work.

[24] From March to May 1819 he had a series of attacks of the cramp, so violent that he once took solemn leave of his children in expectation of decease, that the eccentric Earl of Buchan forced a way into his bedchamber to 'relieve his mind as to the arrangements of his funeral,' and that he entirely forgot the whole of the Bride itself. This, too, was the time of his charge to Lockhart (Familiar Letters, ii. 38), as to his successor in Tory letters and politics—

'Take thou the vanguard of the three, And bury me by the bracken-bush That grows upon yon lily lee.'



[25] It has always struck me that the other form of the legend itself—that in which the 'open window' suggests that the bridegroom's wounds were due to his rival—has far greater capabilities.

[26] Said to embody certain mental peculiarities of that ingenious draughtsman, but rather unamiable person, Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe.

[27] He had said in a letter to Terry, as early as November 20, 1822, that he feared Peveril 'would smell of the apoplexy.' But he made no definite complaint to any one of a particular seizure, and the date, number, and duration of the attacks are unknown.



CHAPTER V

THE DOWNFALL OF BALLANTYNE & COMPANY

Redgauntlet, it has been said, was the last novel on the full scale before the downfall of Scott's prosperity. But before this he had begun The Life of Napoleon and Woodstock, and, in June 1825, had published the Tales of the Crusaders, which contain some work almost, if not quite, equal to his best, and which obtained at first a greater popularity than their immediate predecessors. It was, and generally is, held that The Betrothed, the earlier of the two, was saved by The Talisman; and there can be no doubt that this latter is the better. Contrary to the wont of novelists, Scott was at least as happy with Richard here as he had been in Ivanhoe, and though he owed a good deal in both to the presentation of his hero in the very interesting romance published by his old secretary Weber,—one of the best of all the English verse romances and the first English poem to show a really English patriotism,—he owed nothing but suggestion. The duel at the Diamond in the Desert is admittedly one of the happiest things of the kind by a master in that kind, and if the adventures in the chapel of Engedi are both a little farcical and a little 'apropos of nothing in particular,' the story nowhere else halts or fails till it reaches its real 'curtain' with the second Accipe hoc! If it had been longer, it might not have been so strong, but as it is, it is nearly perfect.

But there is also more good in The Betrothed than it is usual to allow. The beginning, the siege of the Garde Doloureuse, and the ghostly adventure of Eveline at the Saxon manor are excellent; while, even later, Scott has entangled the evidence against Damian and the heroine with not a little of the skill which he had shown in compromising Waverley. Had not James Ballantyne dashed the author's spirits with some of his cavillings, the whole might have been as much of a piece as The Talisman is. Indeed, it must be confessed that, though Lockhart is generous enough on this point to the man to whom he has been accused of being unjust, we have very little evidence of any improvement in Scott's work due to James, while we know that he did harm not once only. But, as it stands, the book no doubt exhibits the usual faults, that languishing of the middle action, for instance, which injures The Bride of Lammermoor and The Monastery, together with the much more common huddling and improbability of the conclusion. But we know that this last was put on hurriedly, against the grain, and after the author, disgusted by the grumblings of others, had relinquished his work; so that we cannot greatly wonder.

It is impossible here to depict in detail Scott's domestic life during the years which passed since we last noticed it, and which represent the most flourishing time of his worldly circumstances. The estate of Abbotsford gradually grew, always at fancy prices, till the catastrophe itself finally prevented an expenditure of L40,000 in a lump on more land. The house grew likewise to its hundred and fifty feet of front, its slightly confused but not disagreeable external muddle of styles, and reproductions, and incorporated fragments, and its internal blend of museum and seignorial hall. It was practically completed and splendidly 'house-warmed' to celebrate the marriage (3rd February 1825) of the heir, on whom both house and estate were settled, with no very fortunate result. Between it and Castle Street the family oscillated as usual, when summer and winter, term and vacation, called them. At Abbotsford open house was always kept to a Noah's ark-full of visitors, invited and uninvited, high and low, and Castle Street saw more modest but equally cordial and constant hospitalities, in which the Lockharts were pretty frequent participators; while their country home at Chiefswood was a sort of escaping place for Sir Walter when visitors made Abbotsford unbearable. The 'Abbotsford Hunt' yearly rejoiced the neighbours; and though, as his health grew weaker, Scott's athletic and sporting exercises were necessarily and with insidious encroachment curtailed, he still did all he could in this way. In 1822 there was the great visit of George IV. to Scotland, wherein Sir Walter took a part which was only short, if short at all, of principal; and of this Lockhart has left one of his liveliest and most pleasantly subacid accounts. Visits to England were not unfrequent; and at last, in the summer of 1825, Scott made a journey, which was a kind of triumphal progress, to Ireland, with his daughter Anne and Lockhart as companions. The party returned by way of the Lakes, and the triumph was, as it were, formally wound up at Windermere in a regatta, with Wilson for admiral of the lake and Canning for joint-occupant of the triumphal boat. 'It was roses, roses all the way,' till in the autumn of the year the rue began, according to its custom, to take their place.

The immediate cause of the disaster was Scott's secret partnership in the house of Ballantyne & Co., which, dragged down by the greater concerns of Constable & Co. in Edinburgh and Hurst, Robinson, & Co. in London, failed for the nominal amount of L117,000 at the end of January 1826.[34] Their assets were, in the first place, claims on the two other firms, which realised a mere trifle; and, in the second place, the property, the genius, the life, and the honour of Sir Walter Scott.

When one has to deal briefly with very complicated and much-debated matters, there is nothing more important than to confine the dealing to as few points as possible. We may, I think, limit the number here to two,—the nature and amount of the indebtedness itself, and the manner in which it was met. The former, except so far as the total figures on the debtor side are concerned, is the question most in dispute. That the printing business of Ballantyne & Co. (the publishing business had lost heavily, but it had long ceased to be a drain), in the ordinary literal sense owed L117,000—that is to say, that it had lost that sum in business, or that the partners had overdrawn to that amount—nobody contends. Lockhart's account, based on presumably accurate information, not merely from his father-in-law's papers, but from Cadell, Constable's partner, is that the losses were due partly to the absolutely unbusinesslike conduct of the concern, and the neglect for many years to come to a clear understanding what its profits were and what they were not; partly to the ruinous system of eternally interchanged and renewed bills, so that, for instance, sums which Constable nominally paid years before were not actually liquidated at the time of the smash; but most of all to a proceeding which seems to pass the bounds of recklessness on one side, and to enter pretty deeply into those of fraud on the other. This is the celebrated affair of the counter-bills, things, according to Lockhart, representing no consideration or value received of any kind, but executed as a sort of collateral security to Constable when he discounted any of John Ballantyne's innumerable acceptances, and intended for use only if the real and original bills were not met. Still, according to Lockhart, this system was continued long after there was any special need for it, and a mass of counter-bills, for which the Ballantynes had never had the slightest value, and the amount of which they had either discharged or stood accountable for already on other documents, was in whole or part flung upon the market by Constable in the months of struggle which preceded his fall, and ranked against Ballantyne & Co., that is to say, Scott, when that fall came.

This account, when published in the first edition of Lockhart's Life, provoked strong protests from the representatives of the Ballantynes, and a rather acrimonious pamphlet war followed, in which Lockhart is accused by some not merely of acrimony, but of a supercilious and contemptuous fashion of dealing with his opponents. He made, however, no important retractations later, and it is fair to say that not one of his allegations has ever been disproved by documentary evidence, as certainly ought to have been possible while all the documents were at hand. Nor did the Memoirs of Constable, published many years later, supply what was and is missing; nor does Mr. Lang, with all his pains, seem to have found anything decisive. The assertions opposed to Lockhart's are that the 'counter-bill' story is not true, and that the distresses of Ballantyne & Co., and the dangerous extent to which they were involved in complicated bill transactions with Constable, were at least partly due to reckless drawings by the senior partner for his land purchases and other private expenses. Between the two it is impossible to decide with absolute certainty.[32] All that can be said is this. First, considering that the whole original capital of the firm was Scott's, that he had repeatedly saved it from ruin by his own exertions and credit, and that a very large part of the legitimate grist that came to its mill was supplied by his introduction of work to be printed, he was certainly entitled to the lion's share of any profit that was actually earned. Secondly, the neglect to balance accounts, and the reckless fashion of interweaving acceptance with drawing and drawing with acceptance, had, as we know, been repeatedly protested against by him. Thirdly, his private expenditure, very moderate at Castle Street, and not recklessly lavish even at Abbotsford, must have been amply covered by his official and private income plus no great proportion of the always large and latterly immense supplies which for nearly twenty years he derived from his pen. It is impossible to see that, except by his carelessness in neglecting to ascertain from time to time the exact liabilities of the firm, he had added to the original fault of joining it, or had in any other way deserved the blow that fell upon him. No one can believe, certainly no one has ever proved, that his earnings, and his salaries, and the value of his property, if capitalised, would not have covered, and far more than covered, the cost of Abbotsford, land and house, the settlements on his children, and the household expenses of the whole fifteen years and more since he became a housekeeper there. While, as for the printing business itself, it admittedly ought to have made a handsome profit from first to last, and certainly did make a handsome profit as soon as it fell under reasonably business-like management afterwards.

There remains the said 'original fault' of engaging in the business at all, and that, I think, can never be denied. The very introduction of joint-stock companies, to which, in part, Scott owed his ruin, has made a confusion between professional and commercial occupations which did not then exist; but even now I think it would hardly be considered decent for a public servant, discharging judicial functions, to carry on actual business in a private trading concern. Moreover, the secrecy which Scott observed—to such an extent that his family and his most intimate friends did not know the facts—could come from nothing but a sense of something amiss, and certainly led to the commission of not a little that was so. Scott had to conceal the actual and very material truth when he applied to the Duke of Buccleuch for the guarantee that saved him a dozen years earlier. He had to conceal it from the various persons who employed Ballantyne & Co., and were induced to do so by him. He had to conceal it when he executed those settlements on his son's marriage, which certainly would have been affected had it been known that the whole of his fortune was subject to an unlimited liability. The mystery of his unconsciousness of all this may be left pretty much where Lockhart, with full acknowledgment, left it. I have said that his action seems to have originated partly in a blind and causeless fear of poverty, which, as blind and causeless fear so often does, made him run into the very danger he tried to avoid, partly in an incomprehensible partiality for the Ballantynes.[30] We have no evidence, in any degree trustworthy, that during the entire term of his connection with the firm he derived any positive profit from it at all commensurate with his actual sinkings of money and his sacrifices and exertions of various kinds. The whole thing is, once more, a mystery, and the best comment is perhaps the simple one that the means which a man takes to ruin or seriously damage himself generally do seem a mystery to others, and probably are so to himself. Nor is there anything more unusual in the colossal irony of the situation, when we find Scott, just before his own ruin, and in the act of giving his friend Terry the actor a guarantee (which, as it happened, he had to pay), writing[36] words of the most excellent sense on the rashness of engaging in commercial undertakings without sufficient capital, the madness of dealing in bills, and his own resolve to have nothing to do with any business carried on 'by discounts and renewals.' The irony, let it be repeated, is colossal; yet we meet it, we commit it, every day.

It is painful to read that during the months of uncertainty which preceded the actual crash, Scott threw the helve after the hatchet by charging himself personally, first, with an advance, or, at least, bond for L5000, and then for another of double that amount,[29] to help two firms, Constable and Hurst & Robinson, whose combined indebtedness was over half a million. But the fact of his doing so was sufficient indication of the spirit in which he would meet the crash of Ballantyne & Co. itself. The whole of the Diary (v. infra) of the period is one long illustration (without the slightest pretentiousness or self-consciousness) of the famous line of perhaps his own greatest poetical passage—

'No thought was there of dastard flight.'

He had made up his mind, before it was certainly imminent, that bankruptcy was not to be accepted; evasion of any more thorough kind, if it occurred, he dismissed at once as not even to be thought of. Yet it is perhaps to be regretted that the mode in which the disaster was actually met, heroic as it was, was substituted for that of which he had at first thought—the simple throwing up of every scrap of his property, including all but a bare subsistence out of his official incomes, which could not have been touched without difficulty. Had he done, or been able to do this, had he shaken off the vampire in stone and lime and hungry soil which had so long sucked his blood, had he sold the library, and the 'Gabions of Jonathan Oldbuck,'[35] and the Japanese papers, and the Byron vase, and the armour, had he mortgaged his incomes by help of insurance, sold his copyrights outright, and, in short, realised everything, it does not seem absolutely certain that he might not have paid off his creditors in full, or, at least, left but a small balance to be discharged by less superhuman and fatal exertions than those actually made. The time was not a good time for selling, no doubt; but, on the other hand, the interest in Abbotsford and its master was still at its height, and the enthusiasm, which actually inspired one anonymous offer of thirty thousand pounds on loan in a lump, would probably have made good bargains for him on sales. He would then have been a free, or nearly a free man, with his own exertions untrammelled, or nearly so; and, serious as were the warnings that his health had given or received, the actual history of the next six or seven years seems to show that, had the machine been driven with less unsparing ferocity, and at a more moderate rate, it might have lasted for years, and even restored its master to competence, if not to wealth.