and delightful harvest of literature. "My opinion of it," said Lord Holland, when some one asked him what he thought of the new novel, "none of us went to bed all night, and nothing slept but my gout." Once more Scott had. taken by assault the world of letters. One solitary individual, avid of notoriety, and seeking, like Herostratus of old, to gain it quocunque modo, is said to have made himself remarkable as "the man who had never read the Waverley novels." To such a one, if he has a follower in these, latter days, criticism would be useless; while to the rest of the world, who read and love them, it would be alike supererogatory.
"While the harness sore galls, and the spurs his side goad,
The high-mettled Racer's a hack on the road"—
The peculiarity in the conformation of Scott's head is noteworthy; but the apex of the cone is more sharply fastigated here than in a cast after death on a bracket before me. This is said to be due to an enlargement of the organ of "veneration," and phrenologists strive to render the fact accordant with their theory by pointing to his reverent regard for the monuments and records of the past. But this was manifested only with regard to those of his own country. When in his last dire struggle against Debt and Disgrace,—his superhuman efforts to free himself by mere brain-work from the immense habilities in which, from circumstances into which I have no space now to enter, he had become involved,—he rendered applicable to himself the lines of Dibdin:—
and made a hopeless voyage to Italy in search of health, he showed no sympathy with the ancients, and derived no gratification from the sight of classical antiquities. Rome to him, as it was to some other traveller, appeared naught but a " fine city, very much out of repair." No feeling was awakened, even when he stood amid the galleries of the Coliseum, or the ruined arches of the Baths of Caracalla; and the Temple of Apollo, the Forum, the Bay of Baise, the Lake of Avernus, and the storied Misenum, only served to suggest a line of a Jacobite ditty! Like the stricken warrior of Virgil:—
"———dulces moriens reminiscitur Argos,"—
and it was only when he returned to the old familiar scenes that he seemed for a time to regain some portion of that health and strength which he had gone so far to seek. "I have seen much," he said, "but nothing like my ain house." Here he lingered for a few days, and died at Abbotsford, on September 17th, 1832, in the sixty-second year of his age. His last intelligible words to Lockhart were,—"I may have but a minute to speak to you. My dear, be a good man,—be virtuous,—be religious,—be a good man. Nothing else will give you any comfort, when you come to lie here."
I have alluded to the financial liabilities of Sir Walter,— a long and intricate question to unravel. Lockhart's allusions to these in the life of his father-in-law gave great offence to the trustees and executors of James Ballantyne: and these gentlemen sought to vindicate the character and conduct of their friend, "so foully aspersed," by the publication of a lengthy pamphlet entitled. Refutation of the Misstatements and Calumnies contained in Mr. Lockhart's Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart., respecting the Messrs. Ballantyne, etc. (London, 1838, 8vo, pp. 96). This was answered at length by Lockhart, and the entire question is treated fairly and ex-
