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brilliant years; but it is indispensable to say, that his dream of territorial acquisition was realized with a splendour which, a few years before, he himself could not have hoped for. The first step was taken in 1811, by the purchase of a small farm of a hundred acres on the banks of the Tweed, which received the name of Abbotsford, and in a few years grew, by new purchases, into a large estate. The modest dwelling first planned on this little manor, with its two spare bed-rooms and its plain appurtenances, expanded itself in like manner with its master's waxing means of expenditure, till it had become that baronial castle which we now reverentially visit as the minstrel's home. The hospitality of the poet increased with his seeming prosperity; his mornings were dedicated to composition, and his evenings to society; and from the date of his baronetcy in 1820 to the final catastrophe in 1826, no mansion in Europe, of poet or of nobleman, could boast such a succession of guests illustrious for rank or talent, as those who sat at Sir Walter Scott's board, and departed proud of having been so honoured. His family meanwhile grew up around him; his eldest son and daughter married; most of his early friends continued to stand by his side; and few that saw the poet in 1825, a hale and seemingly happy man of fifty-four, could have guessed that there remained for him only a few more years (years of mortification and of sorrow), before he should sink into the grave, struck down by internal calamity, not by the gentle hand of time.

And yet not only was this the issue, but, even in the hour of his greatest seeming prosperity, Scott had again and again been secretly struggling against some of the most alarming anxieties. On details as to his unfortunate commercial engagements we cannot here enter. It is enough to say, that the printing company of which he was a partner, which seems to have had considerable liabilities even before the establishment of the publishing house, was now inextricably entangled with the concerns of the latter, many of whose largest speculations had been completely unsuccessful; that, besides this, both firms were involved to an enormous extent with the house of Constable; and that large sums, which had been drawn by Sir Walter as copyright-money for the novels, had been paid in bills which were still current, and threatening to come back on him.

In the beginning of 1826, Constable's house stopped payment; and the failure of the firm of Ballantyne, for a very large sum, followed instantly and of course. Probably even the utter ruin which this catastrophe brought upon Scott, was not more painful to him than the exposure which it necessarily in volved, of those secret connections, the existence of which even his most confidential friends could till now have at most only suspected. But if he had been imprudent, he was both courageous and honourable; and in no period of his life does

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he appear to such advantage, as when he stood, as now beggared, huinbled, and covered with a load of debt from which no human exertions seemed able to relieve him. He came forward without a day's delay, and refused to be dealt with as an ordinary bankrupt, or to avail himself of those steps which would have set him free from the claims of his creditors, on surrendering his property to them. He insisted that these claims should, so far as regarded him, be still allowed to subsist; and he pledged himself that the labour of his future life should be unremittingly devoted to the discharge of them. He did more than fulfil his noble promise; for the gigantic toil to which, during years after this, he submitted, was the immediate cause that shortened his life. His self-sacrifice, however, effected astonishingly much towards the purpose which it was designed to serve. Between January 1826 and January 1828, he had realized for the creditors the surprising sum of nearly £40,000; and soon after his death the principal of the whole Ballantyne debt was paid up by his executors.

We have now briefly to describe the efforts by which this result was accomplished. After spending at Abbotsford, in 1826, a solitary summer, very unlike its former scenes of splendour, Scott, returning to town for his winter duties, and compelled to leave behind him his dying wife (who survived but till the spring), took up his residence in lodgings, and there continued that system of incessant and redoubled labour which he had already maintained for months, and maintained afterwards till it killed him. Woodstock, published in 1826, had been written during the crisis of his distresses; and the next fruit of his toil was the Life of Napoleon, which, commenced before the catastrophe, appeared in 1827, and was followed by the First Series of Chronicles of the Canongate; while to these again succeeded, in the end of the same year, the First Series of the Tales of a Grandfather. The year 1828 produced the Second Series of both of these works; 1829 gave Anne of Geierstein, the first volume of a History of Scotland for Lardner's Cyclopædia, and the Third Series of the Tales of a Grandfather. The same year also witnessed the commencement of that annotated publication of the collected novels, which, together with the similar edition of the poetical works, was so powerful an instrument in effecting Scott's purpose of pecuniary disentanglement. In 1830 came two Dramas, the Letters on Demonology, the Fourth Series of the Tales of a Grandfather, and the second volume of the History of Scotland. If we are disappointed when we compare most of these works with the productions of younger and happier days, our criticism will be disarmed by a recollection of the honourable end which the later works promoted; and as to the last productions of the mighty master, the volumes of 1831 containing Count Robert and Castle Dangerous, no one who is acquainted with the melancholy circumstances under which these were

composed and published, will be capable of any feeling but that of compassionate respect.

The dejection which it was impossible for Scott not to feel in commencing his self-imposed task, was materially lightened, and his health invigorated, by an excursion to London and Paris in the course of 1826, for the purpose of collecting materials for the Life of Napoleon. In 1829 alarming symptoms appeared, and were followed by a paralytic attack in February 1830, after which the tokens of the disease were always more or less perceptible to his family; but the severity of his tasks continued unremitted, although in that year he retired from his clerkship, and took up his permanent residence at Abbotsford. The mind was now but too evidently shaken, as well as the body; and the diary which he kept, contains, about and after this time, melancholy misgivings of his own upon this subject. In April 1831 he had the most severe shock of his disease that had yet attacked him; and having been at length persuaded to abandon literary exertion, he left Abbotsford in September of that year, on his way to the Continent, no country of which he had ever yet visited, except some parts of France and Flanders. This new tour was undertaken with the faint hope that abstinence from mental labour might for a time avert the impending blow. A ship of war, furnished for the purpose by the Admiralty, conveyed Sir Walter, first to Malta, and then to Naples; and the accounts which we have, both of the voyage and of his residence in Italy, abound with circumstances of melancholy interest. After the beginning of May 1832, his mind was completely overthrown; his nervous impatience forced his companions to hurry him homeward from Rome through the Tyrol to Frankfort; in June they arrived in London, whence Sir Walter was conveyed by sea to Edinburgh; and, having reached Abbotsford on the 11th of July, he there continued to exist, with few intervals of consciousness, till the afternoon of the 21st of September, when he expired, having just completed the sixty-first year of his age. On the 26th he was buried in the beautiful ruins of Dryburgh Abbey.

THE

LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL:

A POEM

IN SIX CANTOS.

Dum relego, scripsisse pudet; quia plurima cerno,
Me quoque, qui feci judice, digna lini.

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