Street, when suddenly a shade came over Menzies' face, who was seated opposite Lockhart. 'Are you well enough?'-'Yes; at least when I change places with you I shall. But the fact is, there is a confounded hand in sight of me here, which has often bothered me before, and it won't let me fill my glass with right good-will. It never stops. Page after page it throws upon the pile of MS., and still it goes on.'-'Poh!' said Lockhart, glancing across and seeing the hand; 'it is that of some stupid engrossing, everlasting clerk.'-'No,' replied the other; it is that of Walter Scott!' And it was at that moment writing Waverley!

This was in 1814. In 1818 Lockhart met Scott for the first time; and we must refer our readers to his graphic description of his habits of unwearied labour,—his private manners, so manly yet bland; his amusing symposia with his publishers on occasion of a new tale; and his daily life in Abbotsford, where, while the caressed of princes, men of letters, and the nobility of the land, he was also the administrator of justice, and a common good to the whole country-side. 'I have neighbours beside me,' writes to us this year a gentleman residing near Melrose, 'old men who, when they are started, will talk for any length of time about the memory of their kind-hearted, un

selfish master, for I find this is the universal feeling; and Sir Walter's large-hearted charity to the labouring poor about Darnick is the great feature in his character; and it, independent of his works, causes his memory to be cherished round Abbotsford.'

During all the close of 1818, and the beginning of 1819, he continued to be assaulted by cramp, and was reduced to a skeleton. His hair became white as snow, his cheek faded, and the last days of the Last Minstrel seemed to have come. He laboured on, however, dictating to William Laidlaw and John Ballantyne (his dictation often interrupted by shouts of agony) The Bride of Lammermoor, The Legend of Montrose, and the most of Ivanhoe. The first two of these appeared in June 1819, and were read with intenser interest that they were thought the last creations of his mind. One day Scott thought himself dying, summoned his family around him, bade them a pathetic and Christian farewell, expressing confidence in his Redeemer, turned then his face to the wall, but fell into a deep sleep, and from that hour began slowly to recover. His disease, which had resisted opiates, heated salt, etc., at last yielded to small doses, composed chiefly of calomel. It is doubtful, however, if he ever became so strong as he had been.

L

He was forty-six when first assailed by the malady, but, ere three years had elapsed, his constitution was at least a decade older. And, while yet the die of his life span doubtful, his aged mother expired on the 24th of December.

CHAPTER XIII.

CULMINATION OF FAME AND FORTUNE-
'IVANHOE' AND BARONETCY.

N the same month that his mother died, and his own life hung trembling in the balance, Ivanhoe appeared. Never in the literary world had there been, perhaps, such a tumult of applause, particularly in England.

'Men met each other with erected look,
The steps were higher that they took;

Friends to congratulate their friends made haste,
And long estranged foes saluted as they passed.'

It seemed an event of national triumph when Ivanhoe rode with his vizor down into the lists, Rebecca by his side, and the Black Knight hovering on the skirts of the scene. As Dr. Johnson says of Gray's Odes, Criticism was lost in wonder.' But it was not, as Johnson would imply in reference to Gray, a wonder blended with doubt

and a spice of scorn, but wonder mixed with unbounded delight, the very feeling of the Queen of Sheba: The half had not been told us. We were prepared for much, but never for aught like this.' We shall inquire as to the justice of these sentiments in a little; at present we record the unquestionable fact. The two tales which preceded it had been welcomed warmly too. There is a fine romantic spirit hovering over the Legend of Montrose. It has a smell of heather, wears a coronet of mist, and a deep autumnal charm. breathes in every page. Byron says of it, indeed justly,' He don't make enough of Montrose.' That hero is dwindled beside three other characters, all admirable and all eccentric,-Sir Dugald Dalgetty, a mixture in equal proportions of trooper, pedant, and picaroon; Ranald MacEagh, the greyhaired Son of the Mist, with his inimitable dying speech to his grandson; and Allan MacAulay, parcel hero, parcel homicide, parcel maniac, and parcel poet. Annot Lyle, whose song comes over his dark soul like a 'sunbeam on a sullen sea,' is a sweet creation. And no episode in all Scott's novels surpasses in stirring adventure, blended with humour, Dalgetty's tour to Inveraray.

Coleridge says that there is an exaggeration in the third series of the Tales of my Landlord and