and Tales of the Author of Waverley" was now drawing to a close, but the "Life of Napoleon;" "Tales of a Grandfather;" "Scottish History;" "Letters on Demonology;" all his Dramas, which are so much inferior to his poems; were produced, along with masses of other casual work, and all the time he continued to keep a Diary, and re-edit his poetry and romances, both of which he knew would be a little fortune to his heirs as well as to himself. But the strain was too great, the application too incessant; the Parliamentary Reform agitation was also beginning, and although his debts were disappearing before the sale of his collected works, his strength gave way. One slight attack of paralysis was followed by another, and it was determined he should travel. Accordingly he sailed from Portsmouth on the 27th October, 1831, landed at Naples on the 17th of December, and proceeded to Rome. Here Thorwaldsen modelled his bust, and it is said in Plon's Life of the sculptor that the interviews were very curious, Thorwaldsen having at once conceived a feeling of the greatest regard for the poet, while neither were at all able to make the other understand a word. Few foreigners are to be found in Edinburgh society, and amongst the thousands of readers of many languages there, very few indeed speak any but their own. Sir Walter was not one of the few, and only spoke French indifferently, Thorwaldsen only Danish and Italian. It was soon apparent that travel was not doing his health good, and he began to hasten home. Still, however, he continued to write, till, reaching London about the middle of June, he was struck down by a partial attack of apoplexy.

The end was evidently approaching. He had left England in the Barham frigate, placed at his disposal by the Government; he returned by the Rhine and Rotterdam. He had been repeatedly on the continent before, but had never crossed the Alps, and now all the splendours of art and nature in Rome, Venice, or anywhere else, failed to excite his faculties or to give him refreshment. Besides, he was a faithful lover of old Scotland; a patriot, who would not exchange the heather for the asphodel; a Northern, like the Sea-king at Constantinople, who saw nothing worthy of his attention; and his great anxiety was to get down to the grey hills of Roxburghshire and the sound of the Tweed.

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,

This is my own, my native land!

was to him all his life an unaffected expression of manly patriotism. At last, when he was with difficulty brought near home, among the places so lovingly described in the "Lay" and in other works,

And soon the Teviot side he won.
Eastward the wooded path he rode,
Green hazels o'er his basnet nod;

He pass'd the Peel of Goldiland,

And cross'd old Borthwick's roaring strand;
Dimly he view'd the Moat-hill's mound,
Where Druid shades still flitted round:
In Hawick twinkled many a light,-

his lethargy broke, and he seemed to revive. "After passing the bridge, the road for a couple of miles loses sight of Abbotsford, and he relapsed into his stupor; but on gaining the bank immediately above it, his excitement became ungovernable. Mr. Laidlaw (his major-domo) was waiting in the porch, and assisted us in lifting him into the dining-room, where his bed had been prepared. He sat bewildered for a few moments, and then lifting his eyes on Laidlaw, said 'Ha! Willie Laidlaw! O man, how often have I thought of you!' By this time his dogs had assembled about his chair; they began to fawn upon him, and lick his hands, and he alternately sobbed and smiled over them, until sleep oppressed him.

"Next day something like a ray of hope broke in upon us. Sir Walter spoke perfectly conscious of where he was, and expressed an ardent wish to be carried out into his garden. Laidlaw and I procured a Bath-chair, and wheeled him out before the door, up and down for some time on the turf, and among the rose-beds, then in full bloom. The grandchildren admired the new vehicle, and would be helping in their way to push it about. He sat in silence, smiling placidly on them and on the dogs their companions, now and then admiring the house, the screen of the garden, the flowers and trees. By-and-by he conversed a little, very composedly, with us,-said he was happy to be at home, that he felt better than he had ever done since he left it, and would, perhaps, disappoint the doctors after all,

"He then desired to be wheeled through his rooms, and we moved him leisurely for an hour or more up and down the hall and great library :-'I have seen much,' he kept saying, 'but nothing like my own house-give me one turn more.'

Day after day followed with similar pathetic records. He hears chapters read from the New Testament and hymns repeated by his grandchild, all of which he remembers perfectly, but when Crabbe is read to him by his own desire-Crabbe was always a great favourite with him, and some of the poems he could, a year before, have repeated by heart, his memory being always very powerful-the passages seemed to affect him as something quite new. He tries to sit down to his desk, saying, he might soon forget what he had to write, but his fingers refuse to close upon the pen, and he gives it up in tears. The words he muttered were thought to relate to the administration of justice as sheriff, or to the planting of trees with his woodsman Purdie, never to his literary work. From the 11th of July, when he arrived at Abbotsford, to the 21st of September, 1832, this state continued. On that day, at half-past one P.M., with all his children about him, two sons, both in the army, and two daughters, one of them married with several children, he breathed his last. "It was a beautiful day-so warm that every window in the house was open-and so perfectly still that the sound of all others most delightful to his ears, 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." Sad to say, in less than the forty-five years since this scene took place, every vestige of that large family has passed away, death has overtaken them all and carried away the young and the middle-aged alike, and there is now no representative, properly speaking, of the poet, the novelist, the baronet of Abbotsford.

The poetry of Sir Walter Scott is all of one character, touching very lightly on the realities of the heart or of actual life. His business was to amuse and at the same time refresh and invigorate; few there are indeed, artists or others, who can do so much! Modesty, fortitude, and magnanimity were his virtues: he was ready to acknowledge the good and the excellent in others, and to undervalue himself, in the comparison. In the Introduction to "Rokeby," in the Edition of 1830, he says, "I shall not, I believe, be accused of ever having attempted to usurp a superiority over many men of genius, my contemporaries; but in point of popularity, not of actual talent, the caprice of the public had certainly given me such a temporary superiority over men, of whom, in regard to poetical fancy and feeling, I scarcely thought myself worthy to loose the shoe-latch." And yet the freshness of the open air and the love of heath and hill distinguished every verse he wrote, and kept healthy and sound the resuscitation of the eight-syllable narrative verse, and the archæological literary form, of the old romances, which he began to revive by editing "Sir Tristram," the form of which was, in fact, precisely that he adopted in his own original works.

The monuments commemorative of Sir Walter Scott have been more numerous and important than those of any other poet of late years-perhaps of any age. In Dryburgh Abbey, where he actually lies, a plain sarcophagus marks the sacred spot, but in several Border towns, in several of the great cities of the empire, and more particularly in Edinburgh, where the elaborate Cross stands in the centre of the wide area of Princes Street, statues and other trophies are erected. But even that in Edinburgh, magnificent as it is, is secondary to that he raised himself in the house, museum, and library of Abbotsford, which a large public subscription after his death helped to secure intact and for ever, as a place of pilgrimage for the lovers of genius from all parts of the world.

The present Edition is Complete, even to the mottoes on chapters in the "Novels and Tales of the Author of Waverley." It includes also the Dramas.

THE

POETICAL AND DRAMATIC WORKS

OF

SIR WALTER SCOTT.

The Lay of the Last Minstrel,

A POEM; IN SIX CANTOS,

-0

Diam relego, seripsisse pudet; quia plurima oerne,
Me quoque, qui feci, judice, digna lini.

quity, accompanied with notes referring to the obscure feuds of barbarous clans, of whose very names civilized history was ignorant. It was, on the whole, one of those books which are more praised than they are read.

In

acknowledgment of his professional talents which they had it in their power to offer. But this is an incident much beyond the ideas of a period of thirty years' distance, when a barrister who really possessed any turn for lighter literature, was at as much pains to conceal it, as if it had in reality been something to be ashamed of; and I could mention more than one instance in which literature and society have suffered much loss, that jurisprudence might be enriched.

At this time I stood personally in a different position from that which I occupied when I first dipt my desperate pen in ink for other purposes than those of my profession. 1796, when I first published the translations from Bürger, I was an insulated individual, with only my own wants to provide for, and having, in a great measure, my own inclinations alone to consult. In 1803, when the second edition of the Minstrelsy appeared, I had arrived at a period of life when men, however thoughtless, encountor duties and circum-choice the counsel takes rank in his profession, stances which press consideration and plans of life upon the most careless minds. I had been for some time married-was the father of a rising family, and, though fully enabled to meet the consequent demands upon me, it was my duty and desire to place myself in a situation which would enable me to make honourable provision against the various contingencies of life.

It may be readily supposed that the attempts which I had made in literature had been unfavourable to my success at the bar. The goddess Themis is, at Edinburgh, and I suppose everywhere else, of a peculiarly jealous disposition. She will not readily consent to share her authority, and sternly demands from her votaries not only that real duty be carefully attended to and discharged, but that a certain air of business shall be observed even in the midst of total idleness. It is prudent, if not absolutely necessary, in a young barrister, to appear completely engrossed by his profession; however destitute of employment he may in reality be, he ought to preserve, if possible, the appearance of full occupation. He should, therefore, seem perpetually engaged among his law-papers, dusting them, as it were; and, as Ovid advises the fair,

Such, however, was not my case; for the reader will not wonder that my open interference with matters of light literature diminished my employment in the weightier matters of the law. Nor did the solicitors, upon whose do me less than justice, by regarding others among my contemporaries as fitter to discharge the duty due to their clients, than a young man who was taken up with running after ballads, whether Teutonic or national. My profession and I, therefore, came to stand nearly upon the footing which honest Slender consoled himself on having established with Mistress Anne Page; "There was no great love between us at the beginning, and it pleased Heaven to decrease it on farther acquaintance.' I became sensible that the time was come when I must either buckle myself resolutely to the "toil by day, the lamp by night,' renouncing all the Delilahs of my imagination, or bid adieu to the profession of the law, and hold another course.

As

I confess my own inclination revolted from the more severe choice, which might have been deemed by many the wiser alternative. my transgressions had been numerous, my repentance must have been signalized by unusual sacrifices. I ought to have mentioned, that since my fourteenth or fifteenth year, my health, originally delicate, had become extremely robust. From infancy I had laboured under the infirmity of a severe lameness, but, as I believe is usually the case with men of spirit who suffer under personal inconveniences of this nature, I had, since the improvement of my health, in defiance of this incapacitating circumstance, distinguished myself by the endurance of toil on foot or horseback, having often walked thirty miles a-day, and rode upwards of a hundred, without resting. In this manner I made many pleasant journeys through parts of the country then not very accessible, gaining more amusement and in

"Si nullus erit pulvis, tamen excute nullum." Perhaps such extremity of attention is more especially required, considering the great number of counsellors who are called to the bar, and how very small a proportion of them are finally disposed, or find encouragement, to follow the law as a profession. Hence the number of deserters is so great, that the least lingering look behind occasions a young novice to be set down as one of the intending fugi-struction than I have been able to acquire tives. Certain it is, that the Scottish Themis was at this time peculiarly jealous of any flirtation with the Muses, on the part of those who had ranged themselves under her banners. This was probably owing to her consciousness of the superior attractions of her rivals. Of late, however, she has relaxed in some instances in this particular, an eminent example of which has been shown in the case of my friend, Mr. Jeffrey, who, after long conducting one of the most influential literary periodicals of the age, with unquestionable ability, has been, by the general consent of his brethren, recently elected to be their Dean of Faculty, or President,-being the highest

since I have travelled in a more commodious manner. I practised most silvan sports also, with some success, and with great delight. But these pleasures must have been all resigned, or used with great moderation, had I determined to regain my station at the bar. It was even doubtful whether I could, with perfect character as a jurisconsult, retain a situation in a volunteer corps of cavalry, which I then held. The threats of invasion were at this time instant and menacing; the call by Britain on her children was universal, and was answered by some, who, like myself, consulted rather their desire than their ability to bear arms. My services, however, were found use