faithful old forester, Tom Purdie, whom Scott's kindness had changed from a poacher into a devoted servant, when he saw the green shooting-coat, white hat, and drab trousers of the jovial Sheriff appearing in the distance on the path that led to the plantations. The decoration of the interior of his mansion by the Tweed, and the collection of old armour, foreign weapons, Indian creases and idols, Highland targets, and a thousand such things, dear to his chivalrous and antiquarian tastes, occupied many of his busiest and happiest hours. Upon his armory and his woodlands, his house and grounds, his furniture and painting, he spent thousands of pounds; and to meet the expenses of such costly doings, and of the free hospitality to which his generous nature prompted him-doing the honours for all Scotland, as he said he coined his rich and fertile brain into vast sums-the prices of his magical works. Unhappily, much of this money was spent before it was earned; and the ruinous system of receiving bills from his publishers as payment for undone work, when once entered upon, grew into a wild and destructive habit. Author and publishers, alike intoxicated by success, became too giddy to look far into the future. Yet that retributive future was coming with swift and awful pace. As they neared the cataract, the smooth, deceitful current, bore them yet more swiftly on. At last the money panic of 1825 came with its perils and its crashes. Hurst and Robinson went down. Then followed Constable and Ballantyne. Scott's splendid fortune, all built of paper now utterly worthless, crumpled up like a torn balloon; and the author of the Waverley Novels stood, 1826 at fifty-five years of age, not penniless alone, but burdened, as a partner in the Ballantyne concern, with a debt of £117,000. Nobly refusing to permit his credi. tors-or rather the creditors of the firm to which he belongedto suffer any loss that he could help, he devoted his life and his pen to the herculean task of removing this mountain-debt. Thus opens the last, the shortest, and the saddest of the four periods into which we have marked out this great life.

A.D.

Already his strong frame had been heavily shaken by severe

illness. Especially in 1819-the year after he accepted the offer of a baronetcy-jaundice had turned the slightly grey hair, that fringed his conical forehead, to snowy white. The first symptoms of apoplexy had appeared in 1823. Yet the valiant soul was never shaken by the failing of the once sturdy frame. Amid the gloom of his commercial distresses-under the deeper sorrow of his wife's death, which befell him in the same sad year-he worked steadily and bravely on. Every day saw its heavy task performed; and he seldom laid aside his pen until he had filled six large pages with close writing, which he calculated as equal to thirty pages of print.

Some months before the crash, he had entered upon a new and much more laborious kind of work. He had undertaken to write a Life of Napoleon Buonaparte. Formerly, with head erect and left hand at liberty for patting his stag-hound Maida, or other canine occupant of his "den," he had been used to write sheet after sheet of a novel with the same facile industry as on that summer evening when the young advocates in George Street saw the vision of a hand. But now he had to gather books, pamphlets, newspapers, letters, and all other kinds of historical materials round his writing-table, and painfully and slowly, note-book in hand, to wade through heavy masses of detail in search of dates and facts. Before, he had read for pleasure; the old man had now to read, often with aching head and dim eyes, for the materials of his task. Heavy work for any one; heavier for him, who had been used to pour forth the riches of his own mind without trouble and without research. Both morning and evening must now for the most part be given to literary toil.

Woodstock was the first novel he wrote after his great misfortune; and its sale for £8228-it was the work of only three months-gave strength to the hopes of the brave old man, that a few years would clear him from his gigantic debt. But the toil was killing him. The nine volumes of his "Life of Napoleon" were published in 1827. Essays, reviews, histories, letters, and tales, among the last that series called The Chronicles of the Canongate, poured from the unresting pen as fast as they had ever done in its strongest days. His delightful Tales of a Grandfather, in

408

THE LAST DAYS OF SCOTT.

which for the first time a picturesque colouring was given to history intended for the perusal of the young, were among the works of his declining years. Count Robert of Paris and Castle Dangerous were the last of his published novels. What he called The Opus Magnum, a reprint of his novels with explanatory introductions and notes historical and antiquarian, may also be named as one of the chief tasks in the closing life of the novelist.

1831 A.D.

"

At last, in the midst of his toil, there came a day-February 15th, 1830-when he fell speechless in his drawing-room under a stroke of paralysis. From that time he never was the same man, and " a cloudiness in his words and arrangement shows that the shock had told upon the mind. Fits of apoplexy and paralysis occurred at intervals during that and the following year; and, as a last hope, the worn-out workman sailed in the autumn of 1831 for Malta and Italy. He lived at Naples and at Rome for about six months; and in the former city he spent many of his morning hours in the composition of two novels, The Siege of Malta, and Bizarro, which were never finished, and which last feeble efforts of a mind shattered by disease his friends wisely did not judge it right to publish. On his way home down the Rhine the relentless malady struck him a mortal blow. His earnest wish was to die at Abbotsford, the loved place that had cost him so dear; and there he soon found himself with his grandchildren and his dogs playing round the chair he could not leave.

Perhaps the saddest scene of all this sad time-sadder even than the kneeling family round the dying bed-was the last effort of the author to return to his old occupation. On the 17th of July, awaking from sleep, he desired his writing materials to be prepared. When the chair, in which he lay propped up with pillows, was moved into his study and placed before the desk, his daughter put a pen into his hand; but, alas! there was no power in the fingers to close on the familiar thing. It dropped upon the paper, and the helpless old man sank back to weep in silence.

Little more than two months later, on the 21st of September

LIST OF SCOTT'S CHIEF WORKS.

409

1832, this great man died, as he had wished to die, at Abbotsford, with all his children round his bed; and on the fifth day after death his body was laid beside the dust of his wife in Dryburgh Abbey, whose grey walls he had seen among the yews from his grassy seat on the crags of Sandy-Knowe.

Some of Scott's chief works have been named in sketching his life. We subjoin here, for more accurate reference, a chronological list of the most important. Any one who has glanced over the catalogue of his writings appended to his Life by Lockhart, will know how useless it would be to give a complete list in a book like this :

Though facile princeps in his own peculiar realm of poetry, Scott's brilliant renown rests chiefly on his novels. The same love of chivalrous adventure and mediæval romance colours his best works in both branches of literature. The author of "Marmion" and "The Lady of the Lake" was just the man to produce, in maturer age and with finer literary skill, the changeful, pathetic brilliance of "Waverley," and the courtly splendour of "Kenilworth." Of his poems, "The Lady of the Lake" is perhaps the best. Nothing could surpass, for vivid force, the meeting and the duel between the disguised king and the rebel chieftain, Roderick Dhu; or that rapid flight of the Fiery Cross over mountain and moor, by which the clansmen are summoned to the tryst. The opening of Michael Scott's grave, in the "Lay of the Last Minstrel," and the battle of Flodden, at the close of "Marmion," are pictures that none but true genius could paint. The fine songs, scattered through the works of Scott, afford further evidence of his great poetic powers. Who does not know and delight in Young Lochinvar and Bonnie Dundee ?

Scott was eminently a painter in words. The picturesque was his forte. Witness the magnificent descriptions of natural scenery -sunsets, stormy sea, deep woodland glades-with which many of his chapters open. But his portraitures surpass his landscapes. For variety and true painting of character he was undoubtedly the Shakspere of our English prose. What a crowd of names, "familiar as household words," come rushing on the mind, as we think of the gallery of portraits his magical pencil has left for our endless delight and study! There is scarcely a class of old Scottish life without its type in this collection. Dominie Sampson-Nicol Jarvie Jeanie Deans-Edie Ochiltree-Jonathan Oldbuck-Meg Dods-Dandie Dinmont-Dugald Dalgetty -their descendants (typical, of course) may still be found by the banks of Forth and Clyde and Tweed.

Of the twenty-nine tales which form the Waverley Novels, the