dent: One moonlight night I found Sir Walter standing in a newly-built street, apparently in a deep reverie. “I was considering," he said, "what it is best to do. I have been at one party, and was engaged to another; but look at these habiliments! It happened by a most ludicrous chance, and to my own very great surprise, that I found myself a few minutes ago lying at the bottom of a wet gravel-pit, from which I have just emerged; and I believe it is indispensable to steer homewards and refit, otherwise the whole discourse at Lady

's rout will consist of explanations why the unfortunate lion appears in such bad condition." And at this he laughed heartily.' His lameness began to get worse; but that, too, he bore with the same equanimity that he did such penalties of popularity as he specifies in the following: 'People make me the oddest requests. It is not unusual for an Oxonian or Cantab, who has outrun his allowance, and of whom I know nothing, to apply to me for the loan of £20, £50, or £100. A captain of the Danish naval service writes to me that, being in distress for a sum of money by which he might transport himself to Columbia to offer his services in assisting to free that province, he had dreamed I had generously made him a present of it. I can tell him his dream by con

traries. I begin to find, like Joseph Surface, that a good character is inconvenient.'

The next is a kindly notice of poor William Knox, a nearly forgotten poet: 'A young poet of considerable talent died here a week or two ago. His father was a respectable yeoman; and he himself, succeeding to good farms, became too soon his master, and plunged into dissipation and ruin. His talent then showed itself in a fine strain of pensive poetry, called, I think, The Lonely Hearth, far superior to that of Michael Bruce, whose consumption, by the way, has been the life of his poems. I had Knox at Abbotsford, but found him unfit for that sort of society. He scrambled on writing for booksellers, and living like the Otways and Savages of former days. His last works were spiritual hymns, which he wrote very well.' Scott was very friendly to Knox, and sometimes sent him £10 at a time. We are familiar with some of his Biblical verses, which are sweet and sad, and resemble, at times, in his own words,

'The harp-strings' holiest measures,

When dreams the soul of lands of rest

And everlasting pleasures.'

Here is a characteristic touch: A stormy and rainy day. Walk it from the Court through the

rain. I like this; for no man that ever stepped on heather has less dread than I of the catch-cold, and I seem to regain, in buffeting with the wind, some of the high spirits with which in younger days I used to enjoy a Tam o' Shanter ride through darkness, wind, and rain, the boughs groaning and cracking over my head, the good horse free to the road, and impatient for home.' Premature senility, nevertheless, comes out in the following optical delusion: When I have laid aside my spectacles to step into a room dimly lighted out of the strong light which I use for writing, I have seen, or seemed to see, through the rims of the same spectacles I have left behind me,-nay, at first put up my hands to my eyes, believing that I had the actual spectacles on.'

Mingled with the following fine passage, the last we shall quote here, we fancy a certain dim foreboding or prevision of calamity: There is nothing more awful than to attempt to cast a glance among the clouds and mists which hide the broken extremity of the celebrated Bridge of Mirza. Yet when every day brings us nigher that termination, we would almost think our views should become clearer. Alas! it is not so. There is a curtain to be withdrawn, a veil to be rent, before we shall see things as they really

are. With the belief of a Deity, the immortality of the soul and of the state of rewards and punishments is indissolubly linked. More we are not to know; but neither are we prohibited from all attempts, however vain, to pierce the solemn, sacred gloom. The expressions used in Scripture are doubtless metaphorical; for penal fires and heavenly melody are only applicable to beings endowed with corporeal senses. Harmony is obviously chosen as the least corporeal of all gratifications of the senses, and as the type of love, unity, and a state of peace and perfect happiness. But they have a poor idea of the Deity, and the rewards destined for the just made perfect, who can only adopt the literal sense of an eternal concert, a never-ending birthday ode. I rather suppose this should be understood as some commission from the Highest, some duty to discharge, with the applause of a satisfied conscience.'

Lockhart says that Wilson might have been the best preacher of the age. We think that, in that department, had both tried it, as well as in poetry and novels, North would have had a dangerous rival in Scott.

CHAPTER XIX.

UNIVERSAL SMASH.

2UT now, as Lockhart has it, 'the muffled drum was in prospect.' The fabric of

prosperity which Scott had reared with such prodigious labour, and which seemed to him and others solid as Ben Nevis, was about to sink like a castle in the clouds, and to leave to the architect only the reality of ruin. We have neither inclination nor sufficient knowledge of the ways of business to dilate at large on the particular causes and circumstances of the well-known catastrophe. A few remarks, founded on a perusal of the documents on both sides of the controversy excited by Lockhart's Life, may, however, be adventured. Scott, as we saw before, had established a business as a printer and bookseller in connection with the Ballantynes. Owing to various causes, the bookselling firm was utterly unsuccessful. When wound