Lake' for ever in vain. But with this exception, and one or two other passages scattered through the book, it is a mere piece of senile garrulity,-like a long, endless story told by an old man half asleep in his easy-chair; and the first chapter or two, contrasted with the rest, reminds us of one of the passes from the low country to the Highlands, very grand, but leading up often to dreary monotonies of desolation. Ten years before, Anne of Geierstein would have come out from his hands a

'Child of strength and state;'

and Switzerland would have hailed Scott as her novelist as indisputably as he had long been that of his native land. '

CHAPTER XXIII,

THE STRONG MAN BOWED DOWN.

2Y the close of 1829 Scott had done a great deal more work. He had written

B

the first volume of a History of Scotland for Dr. Lardner's Cyclopædia; he had ready for publication by December the last of the Scottish series of The Tales of a Grandfather; and had been working diligently at the prefaces and notes to the Opus Magnum. The sale of this last was most cheering. Ere 1829 was over, eight volumes had been issued, and the monthly sale amounted to 35,000 copies. This gave the prospect that, with the continuance of health and his usual capacity of work, his debts in a few years would be entirely liquidated.

But, alas! although his industry could always be calculated on, his health now could not. Besides rheumatisms, symptoms of diabetes,—a here

ditary trouble from which his father had suffered,and other minor ailments, he complained for some weeks of headaches and great nervous irritation, till hæmorrhage gave him a doubtful and ominous relief. Cupping became necessary, and he manfully submitted to it, although he describes it as a 'giant twisting about your flesh between his finger and thumb.' He felt for the time better than he had been for years before; but his friends were alarmed, for they knew that the first preliminary blow of the axe of apoplexy had been struck. In his Diary, among its last entries this season, he records an interview, the first and last, with Edward Irving. His description will interest more now than when it was first published: 'I met to-day the celebrated divine and soi disant prophet Irving. He is a fine-looking man (bating a diabolical squint), with talent on his brow, and madness in his eye. I could hardly keep my eyes off him while we were at table. He put me in mind of the devil disguised as an angel of light, so ill did that horrible obliquity of vision harmonize with the dark, tranquil features of his face, resembling that of our Saviour in Italian pictures, with the hair carefully arranged in the same manner. There was much real or affected simplicity in the manner in which he spoke. He spoke with that

kind of unction which is nearly allied to cajolery. He boasted much of the tens of thousands that attended his ministry at the town of Annan, his native place, till he well-nigh provoked me to say he was a distinguished exception to the rule that "a prophet was not esteemed in his own country."' There is a spice of prejudice in this picture, though we presume it is in the main true. We imagine Irving would not be quite at ease, or altogether himself, when meeting at a dinner party with Edinburgh lawyers, litterateurs, and fashionables. Had he met Scott alone, they would have taken to each other at once; for Irving was the most genial of men, and as thorough a Scotchman as Sir Walter. Perhaps Scott, too, was under the influence of Lockhart, who speaks here of Irving 'as deposed on account of his wild heresies,' and who, in a letter inserted in Mrs. Gordon's Life of Professor Wilson, talks of him as a mere quack, whose popularity was entirely owing to his attitudes and the tones of his voice. How differently the world rates Lockhart and Irving now! And how all must regret that two such noble beings as Irving and Scott had not got into rapport with each other, the one the great Border Preacher, and the other the great Border Poet,-both men of the warmest heart and the most exalted genius!

Tom Purdie died this autumn in a moment. Scott mourned his loss greatly. We gave before an extempore epitaph he proposed for him; his more deliberate one, written by the heart as well as hand of his master, may be found over his grave near the Abbey of Melrose.

Early in 1830 Scott published The Ayrshire Tragedy, a piece of some interest as a story, but not much poetical merit. On the 15th of February a tragic event occurred to himself. At two o'clock afternoon he returned home from the Parliament House, and while conversing with an old lady, a Miss Young of Hawick, who had called to show him some MS. memoirs of her father, a Dissenting clergyman of eminence in his day, sunk down, with a slight convulsion agitating his features. He ultimately fell at all his length on the floor, speechless and senseless. He was instantly bled, and then cupped, submitted to a severe regimen, and after some weeks he partially recovered. He resumed, of course, his pen, and became as busy as he had been in 1829, with Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft for Murray's Family Library, the second volume of his History of Scotland for Lardner, and the fourth series of Tales of a Grandfather on French History. All of them bore unmistakeable indications of the shock he