in private, to give his health as 'the Author of Waverley. He did so, accordingly, in glowing terms. A storm of applause is said to have followed. A Glasgow litterateur present on the occasion says, on the contrary, that the applause was rather cold, and would have been much more enthusiastic had the toast been given in the capital of the West. Be this as it may, Scott's reply was in admirable taste; and the last sentence must have brought down the house: 'I beg leave to propose the health of my friend Bailie Nicol Jarvie (Mackay the Actor); and I am sure that, when the author of Waverley and Rob Roy drinks to the health of Nicol Jarvie, the applause shall be prodigious. To which Mr. Mackay replied, 'My conscience! my worthy father the deacon could never have believed that his son would have such a compliment paid him by the Great Unknown.' Lockhart adds a ludicrous thing. After resuming the chair, Scott sent a slip of paper to Patrick Robertson, begging him to confess something too; why not the murder of Begbie? but this, if done by the facetious Peter, must have been at a late hour of the evening.' We can imagine the solemn gravity with which Peter of the Painch would rise, like a penitent Sir John Falstaff, as if some awful birth of guilt were riving his continental bosom ;

what profoundly ludicrous sorrow would sit upon his heavy features and half-shut eyne; and how, after some beatings of breast and painch, sepulchral sighs, and genuine Burgundy begot tears, he would proceed, in tones as dolorous and guttural as those of his famous Gaelic sermons, to deliver himself of his dread secret; and how, when from the Man Mountain in labour there sprang to light the old story of the robbery and murder at noonday of the bank porter, thunders of applause, dying away in convulsive laughter, would welcome the offspring, and almost drown its parent as he sank exhausted in the chair! We can fancy all this,. and fancy, too, with what delight Scott would have witnessed it had he waited, and prided himself on being the grandfather of the joke of the evening!

The Waverley secret had ceased to be one from the date of the failure. It had been well kept, considering that twenty persons had been apprised of it. Scott says in his diary: 'Funny thing at the theatre last night. Among the discourse on High Life below Stairs, one of the ladies' ladies asks, "Who wrote Shakspeare?". One says, "Ben Johnson;" another, "Finis." "No," said an actor, "Sir Walter Scott; he confessed it at a public meeting t'other day." And thus the Prophet was at last unveiled.

CHAPTER XXI.

'NAPOLEON TO THE RESCUE.'

REAT things had been expected of his
Napoleon, at least by the general and

distant public. They imagined that it would at once re-establish his fading fame and redeem his ruined fortunes. 'Napoleon to the rescue!' became the cry along the line of his wavering battle. The initiated, however, knew better. They were aware that the sum he might get for this work, however large, was a mere drop in the great bucket of his engagements, and they were aware of the difficulties with which disease, sorrow, bereavement, and his careless habits of composition, had environed his task. Some of them must have known that, although two years had elapsed since he began the work, the actual time consumed in the writing was hardly more than a year. And what a year of 'pain, sorrow,

and ruin!' None less than a Michael Scott, or some similar supernatural personage, could have been expected in such a time to write a work worthy of such an author and such a subject. Wreathing ropes of the ribbed sea-sand, or splitting the Eildon Hills in three, were child's play to the task of recording worthily, in the course of a few hundred sittings, the career of the most marvellous man of modern times,-himself, too, the centre of the most multiform and marvellous events in the grandest of eras,-the man without a model and without a shadow,' whose flag for twenty years had been Victory, and his will Fate.

In June 1827 Scott's Life of Napoleon appeared in nine volumes, and met, if not with a rapturous reception, with an enormous sale. It realized, first and second editions included, a profit of £18,000,a fabulous sum in itself, but which, placed against his debts, was a wart to Ossa. Scripture critics speak of notes of time' in portions of the ancient volume. Scott's Napoleon bore but too distinctly its note of time. Haste was visible in every page; and this not the haste of his novels, in which he had been emptying his oldest and richest repositories, spreading out like the wise men of old his farbrought treasures, gold, frankincense, and myrrh, but the haste of one who loads his waggon with

goods in one street to catch the market in another. Many of the descriptions, indeed, especially of battles, are worthy of the author of Marmion and Old Mortality; and the spirit of the whole, particularly in reference to Napoleon himself, is wonderfully impartial. But altogether it ranks rather with compilations than with works of genuine history, and classes its author's name with the Smolletts rather than with the Humes and Robertsons of his country. In profound political and philosophical sagacity it is deficient. Of its sketches of individuals we remember none, unless where he speaks of Danton as a character worthy of the treatment of Shakspeare or Schiller, and as the 'Mahomet of the Revolution.' The style is in some parts exceedingly bald and careless, and in others too florid for narrative; and the flowers have not the natural beauty and bloom of those in his earlier works. Burke was an older man than Scott when he wrote his Regicide Peace, and the figures in its style are as numerous, but they never seem to disguise weakness, always to augment as well as adorn strength. Indeed, Scott's book is not nearly so good, so clear, so compact, and so strong as Lockhart's own two little volumes of Napoleon's Life published in John Murray's Family Library.

William Hazlitt wrote shortly after Scott's work,