Ashestiel in 1808, and an extract from a memorandum which he gave Lockhart gives a most agreeable picture of the poet in his home.

'There he was the cherished friend and kind neighbor of every middling Selkirkshire yeoman, just as easily as in Edinburgh he was the companion of clever youth and narrative old age in refined society. He carried us one day to Melrose Abbey or Newark ; another, to course with mountain greyhounds by Yarrow braes or St. Mary's loch, repeating every ballad or legendary tale connected with the scenery; and on a third, we must all go to a farmer's kirn, or harvest home, to dance with Border lasses on a barn floor, drink whiskey punch, and enter with him into all the gossip and good fellowship of his neighbors, on a complete footing of unrestrained conviviality, equality, and mutual respect. His wife and happy young family were clustered round him, and the cordiality of his reception would have unbent a misanthrope. At this period his conversation was more equal and animated than any man's that I ever knew. It was most characterized by the extreme felicity and fun of his illustrations, drawn from the whole encyclopædia of life and nature, in a style somewhat too exuberant for written narrative, but which to him was natural and spontaneous. A hundred stories, always apposite and often interesting the mind by strong pathos, or eminently ludicrous, were daily told, which, with many more, have since been transplanted, almost in the same language, into the Waverley Novels and his other writings. These and his recitations of poetry, which can never be forgotten by those who knew him, made up the charm that his boundless memory enabled him to exert to the wonder of the gaping lover of wonders. But equally impressive and powerful was the language of his warm heart, and equally wonderful were the conclusions of his vigorous understanding, to those who could return, or appreciate either. Among a number of such recollections, I have seen many of the thoughts which then passed through his mind embodied in the delightful prefaces annexed late in life to his poetry and novels.'

Shortly after the publication of The Lay of the Last Minstrel, and when he was pleasantly established at Ashestiel, James Ballantyne, who had already been helped by Scott with a loan, applied to his old school friend and the now successful author for further aid in his business. Scott took the opportunity to make an investment in Ballantyne's printing business. He became a silent partner with a third interest. It seemed a most reasonable move. He had practically retired from the bar, though he was making an effort, to secure a salaried position as a clerk of the court. He had a fair income, but his real capital he perceived was in his fertile brain, and by allying himself with a printingoffice he would be in a position to get far more than an author's ordinary share in the productions of his pen. There was not the same wide gulf in Edinburgh between trade and profession which existed in London; and though Scott, with the natural pride of an author, did not make public his connection with Ballantyne, he was doubtless led to keep his engagement private quite as much by the advantage which privacy gave him in the influence he could use to turn business into Ballantyne's hands. It is possible that if the Ballantynes had been better business men and cooler headed, — for James Ballantyne's brother John shortly set up as a publisher, and after that the affairs of author, printer, and publisher became inextricably interdependent, - the venture might not have turned out ill, but all the men engaged were of a speculative turn of mind, and Scott's marvellous fecundity and versatility seemed to promise an inexhaustible spring from which the currents of manufacture and trade would flow clearly and steadily. All sorts of enterprises were projected and carried out, beyond and beside Scott's creative work. Editions of standard works, magazines, collections of poetry, rushed forth, and capital was shortly locked up, so that an early bankruptcy would have been inevitable, except for the sudden

discovery of a new source of wealth. This lay in the invention of the Waverley Novels, at first anonymous, which swept the reading world like a freshet swelling into a flood and seeming for a while to be almost a new force in nature. The Waverley Novels for a while saved this mad combination of author, printer, and publisher from going to pieces, and there might possibly have been no catastrophe had not a new element come into action.

Scott, when he formed the partnership with James Ballantyne, took the money which he contributed from a fund with which he had intended buying Broadmeadows, a small estate on the northern bank of the Yarrow. He abandoned at the time this design, but the strong passion which could not fail to possess a man with Scott's deep love of the soil, and his imagination ever busy with historic traditions, still held him; and when the opportunity came, with the rising tide of his own fortunes, to buy a farm a few miles from Ashestiel, he seized it with alacrity. Nor was his venture an unwise one. He was tenant at will at Ashestiel, and had the natural desire of a man with a growing family to establish himself in a permanent home. The farm,' says Lockhart, consisted of a rich meadow or haugh along the banks of the river, and about a hundred acres of undulated ground behind, all in a neglected state, undrained, wretchedly enclosed, much of it covered with nothing better than the native heath. The farm-house itself was small and poor, with a common kail-yard on one flank, and a staring barn on the other, while in front appeared a filthy pond covered with ducks and duckweed, from which the whole tenement had derived the unharmonious designation of Clarty Hole. But the Tweed was everything to him — a beautiful river, flowing broad and bright over a bed of milk-white pebbles, unless here and there where it darkened into a deep pool, overhung as yet only by the birches and alders which had survived the statelier growth of the primitive forest; and the first hour that he took possession he claimed for his farm the name of the adjoining ford, situated just above the influx of the classical tributary Gala. As might be guessed from the name of Abbotsford, these lands had all belonged of old to the great Abbey of Melrose.'

Abbotsford was in the heart of a country already dear to Scott by reason of its teeming historic memories, and here he began and continued through his working days to enrich a creation which was the embodiment in stone and wood and forest and field of the ima gination which at the same time was finding vent in poem and novel and history and essay. The characteristics of the estate which he thus formed were the characteristics of his work as an author also. There is the free nature, the trees planted with a fine sense of landscape effect; there is the reproduction in miniature of the life of a bygone age, and there is the suggestion of the stage with its pasteboard properties, its structures all front, and its men and women acting a part.

6

Ruskin has said with penetrating criticism: Scott's work is always epic, and it is contrary to his very nature to treat any subject dramatically.' In explication of this dictum, Ruskin defines dramatic poetry as the expression by the poet of other people's feelings, his own not being told,' and epic poetry as an 'account given by the poet of other people's external circumstances, and of events happening to them, with only such expression either of their feelings, or his own, as he thinks may be conveniently added.' We must not confound the dramatic with the theatrical. To Scott, who never wrote a successful play, his figures were nevertheless quite distinctly theatrical. That is to say, he placed them before his readers not only vividly, but with the make-up which would bring into conspicuous light rather the outward show than the inward reality. Not that his persons had not clearly conceived characters, and not that he merely missed the modern analytic pre

sentation, but his persons interested him chiefly by their doing things, and these things were the incidents and accidents of life rather than the inevitable consequences of their nature, the irresistible effects of causes lying deep in their constitution. Hence the delight which he takes in battle and adventure of all sorts, and the emphasis which he lays upon the common, elemental qualities of human nature, male and female, rather than upon the individual and eccentric. There is no destiny in his poems or novels, no inevitable drawing to a climax of forces which are moving beyond the power of restraint which the author may in his own mind exercise.

It is not to be wondered at that Scott, breathing the fresh air of the ballads of the border, should make his first leap into the saddle of verse and ride heartily down his short, bounding lines. It is quite as natural that, as his material grew more and more historical in its character, and greater complexities crept in, he should find the narrative of verse too simple, and should resort to the greater range and diversity of prose; and that once having found his power in novel writing, he should have abandoned poetry as a vehicle for epic narrative, contenting himself thenceforth with lyric snatches, and with brief flights of verse. Moreover, in poetry, though he had a delighted audience, and never has failed since to draw a large following entirely satisfied with his form, he shared at the time the throne with that mightier, more dramatic artist, Byron, and knew also that men were beginning to turn their eyes toward Wordsworth and Coleridge. But in fiction he held quite undisputed sway. The fashion in fiction changes perhaps more quickly than in poetry; its representation of the manner of the day, even when it is consciously antiquarian and historic, renders it largely dependent on contemporaneous interest. In Scott's day, Fielding, Smollett, and Richardson were read more because they had not been supplanted than because they appealed strongly to the reader of the time. A more genuine attention was given to Miss Edgeworth, Miss Ferrier, Mackenzie and Galt. But these became at once minor writers when Scott took the field, and he called into existence a great multitude of readers of fiction, establishing thereby a habit of novel reading which was of the greatest service to the later novelists, like Dickens and Thackeray, when they came in with newer appeal to the changing taste of a newer generation.

To all these considerations must be added the incessant demands made upon Scott's brain by the need of keeping on its base the commercial house of cards which he had helped to build and in which he was living, and of carrying farther and farther into reality the dream of a baronial estate which was Rokeby done in plaster. Thus the years went by, full of active occupation, with brilliant pageant indeed, and with social excitement. It is a pleasure, in the midst of it all, to see the real Scott, Sir Walter to the world of display but the genuine master to Tom Purdie and Will Laidlaw, to note the wholesome pride of the firm-footed treader on his own acres, the generous care of others, the absence of cant, religious or social. And when the supreme test came, the test of overwhelming misfortune, the genuineness of this great nature was made plain in the high courage with which he set about the task of paying his creditors, in the toil of year after year, and in those moving passages in his diary when he sat in his loneliness and looked fortune in the face. Listen to the entry in his diary under date December 18, 1825.

come.

"Ballantyne called on me this morning. Venit illa suprema dies. My extremity is Cadell has received letters from London which all but positively announce the failure of Hurst and Robinson, so that Constable & Co. must follow, and I must go with poor James Ballantyne for company. I suppose it will involve my all. But if they

leave me £500, I can still make it £1000 or £1200 a year. And if they take my salaries of £1300 and £300, they cannot but give me something out of them. I have been rash in anticipating funds to buy land, but then I made from £5000 to £10,000 a year, and land was my temptation. I think nobody can lose a penny- that is one comfort. Men will think pride has had a fall. Let them indulge their own pride in thinking that my fall makes them higher, or seems so at least. I have the satisfaction to recollect that my prosperity has been of advantage to many, and that some at least will forgive my transient wealth on account of the innocence of my intentions, and my real wish to do good to the poor. The news will make sad hearts at Darwick, and in the cottages at Abbotsford, which I do not nourish the least hope of preserving. It has been my Delilah, and so I have often termed it; and now the recollection of the extensive woods I planted, and the walks I have formed, from which strangers must derive both the pleasure and the profit, will excite feelings likely to sober my gayest moments. I have half resolved never to see the place again. How could I tread my hall with such a diminished crest? How live a poor indebted man where I was once the wealthy, the honored? My children are provided; thank God for that. I was to have gone there on Saturday in joy and prosperity to receive my friends. My dogs will wait for me in vain. It is foolish - but the thoughts of parting from these dumb creatures have moved me more than any of the painful reflections I have put down. Poor things, I must get them kind masters; there may be yet those who loving me may love my dog because it has been mine. I must end this, or I shall lose the tone of mind with which men should meet distress.

'I find my dogs' feet on my knees. I hear them whining and seeking me everywhere this is nonsense, but it is what they would do could they know how things are. Poor Will Laidlaw! poor Tom Purdie! this will be news to wring your heart, and many a poor fellow's besides to whom my prosperity was daily bread. . . . For myself the magic wand of the Unknown is shivered in his grasp. He must henceforth be termed the Toowell-known. The feast of fancy is over with the feeling of independence. I can no longer have the delight of waking in the morning with bright ideas in my mind, haste to commit them to paper, and count them monthly, as the means of planting such groves, and purchasing such wastes; replacing my dreams of fiction by other prospective visions of walks by

"Fountain heads, and pathless groves,

Places which pale passion loves."

This cannot be; but I may work substantial husbandry, work history, and such concerns, They will not be received with the same enthusiasm. . . . To save Abbotsford I would attempt all that was possible. My heart clings to the place I have created. There is scarce a tree on it that does not owe its being to me, and the pain of leaving it is greater than I can tell.'

Here we close our study of Scott's career. Thenceforth his energy was devoted to a painful clearing away of the ruins of his fortune. With patience and with many gleams of his sunny temperament, he labored on. In the end the debts were settled, Abbotsford was saved to his family, and there on the 21st of September, 1832, Scott died.

'It was

a beautiful day,' says Lockhart, so warm, that every window was wide open- and so perfectly still, that the sound of all others most delicious to his ear, the gentle ripple of the Tweed over its pebbles, was distinctly audible as we knelt around the bed, and his eldest son kissed and closed his eyes.'

H. E. S.