he appear to such advantage, as when he stood, as now, beggared, humbled, and covered with a load of debt from which no human exertions seemed able to relieve him. He came forward without a day's delay, and refused to be dealt with as an ordinary bankrupt, or to avail himself of those steps which would have set him free from the claims of his creditors, on surrendering his property to them. He insisted that these claims should, so far as regarded him, be still allowed to subsist; and he pledged himself that the labour of his future life should be unremittingly devoted to the discharge of them. He did more than fulfil his noble promise; for the gigantic toil to which, during years after this, he submitted, was the immediate cause that shortened his life. His self-sacrifice, however, effected astonishingly much towards the purpose which it was designed to serve. Between January 1826 and January 1828, he had realized for the creditors the surprising sum of nearly £40,000; and soon after his death the principal of the whole Ballantyne debt was paid up by his executors.

We have now briefly to describe the efforts by which this result was accomplished. After spending at Abbotsford, in 1826, a solitary summer, very unlike its former scenes of splendour, Scott, returning to town for his winter duties, and compelled to leave behind him his dying wife (who survived but till the spring), took up his residence in lodgings, and there continued that system of incessant and redoubled labour which he had already maintained for months, and maintained afterwards till it killed him. Woodstock, published in 1826, had been written during the crisis of his distresses; and the next fruit of his toil was the Life of Napoleon, which, commenced before the catastrophe, appeared in 1827, and was followed by the First Series of Chronicles of the Canongate; while to these again succeeded, in the end of the same year, the First Series of the Tales of a Grandfather. The year 1828 produced the Second Series of both of these works; 1829 gave Anne of Geierstein, the first volume of a History of Scotland for Lardner's Cyclopædia, and the Third Series of the Tales of a Grandfather. The same year also witnessed the commencement of that annotated publication of the collected_novels, which, together with the similar edition of the poetical works, was so powerful an instrument in effecting Scott's purpose of pecuniary disentanglement. In 1830 came two Dramas, the Letters on Demonology, the Fourth Series of the Tales of a Grandfather, and the second volume of the History of Scotland. If we are disappointed when we compare most of these works with the productions of younger and happier days, our criticism will be disarmed by a recollection of the honourable end which the later works promoted; and as to the last productions of the mighty master, the volumes of 1831, containing Count Robert and Castle Dangerous, no one who is acquainted with the melancholy circumstances under which these were

composed and published, will be capable of any feeling but that of compassionate respect.

The dejection which it was impossible for Scott not to feel in commencing his self-imposed task, was materially lightened, and his health invigorated, by an excursion to London and Paris in the course of 1826, for the purpose of collecting materials for the Life of Napoleon. In 1829 alarming symptoms appeared, and were followed by a paralytic attack in February 1830, after which the tokens of the disease were always more or less perceptible to his family; but the severity of his tasks continued unremitted, although in that year he retired from his clerkship, and took np his permanent residence at Abbotsford. The mind was now but too evidently shaken, as well as the body; and the diary which he kept, contains, about and after this time, melancholy misgivings of his own upon this subject. In April 1831 he had the most severe shock of his disease that had yet attacked him; and having been at length persuaded to abandon literary exertion, he left Abbotsford in September of that year, on his way to the Continent, no country of which he had ever yet visited, except some parts of France and Flanders. This new tour was undertaken with the faint hope that abstinence from mental labour might for a time avert the impending blow. A ship of war, furnished for the purpose by the Admiralty, conveyed Sir Walter, first to Malta, and then to Naples; and the accounts which we have, both of the voyage and of his residence in Italy, abound with circumstances of melancholy interest. After the beginning of May 1832, his mind was completely overthrown; his nervous impatience forced his companions to hurry him homeward from Rome through the Tyrol to Frankfort; in June they arrived in London, whence Sir Walter was conveyed by sea to Edinburgh; and, having reached Abbotsford on the 11th of July, he there continued to exist, with few intervals of consciousness, till the afternoon of the 21st of September, when he expired, having just completed the sixty-first year of his age. On the 26th he was buried in the beautiful ruins of Dryburgh Abbey.

THE

LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL :

A POEM.

IN SIX CANTOS.

Dum relego, scripsisse pudet; quia plurima cerno,
Me quoque, qui feci, judice, digna lini.

ΤΟ

THE RIGHT HONOURABLE

CHARLES, EARL OF DALKEITH,

THIS POEM IS INSCRIBED

BY

THE AUTHOR.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.

The Poem, now offered to the Public, is intended to illustrate the customs and manners which anciently prevailed on the Borders of England and Scotland. The inhabitants, living in a state partly pastoral and partly warlike, and combining habits of constant depredation with the influence of a rude spirit of chivalry, were often engaged in scenes highly susceptible of poetical ornament. As the description of scenery and manners was more the object of the Author than a combined and regular narrative, the plan of the Ancient Metrical Romance was adopted, which allows greater latitude, in this respect, than would be consistent with the dignity of a regular Poem. The same model offered other facilities, as it permits an occasional alteration of measure, which, in some degree, authorises the change of rhythm in the text. The machinery, also, adopted from popular belief, would have seemed puerile in a Poem which did not partake of the rudeness of the old Ballad, or Metrical Romance.

For these reasons, the Poem was put into the mouth of an ancient Minstrel, the last of the race, who, as he is supposed to have survived the Revolution, might have caught somewhat of the refinement of modern poetry, without losing the simplicity of his original model. The date of the Tale itself is about the middle of the sixteenth century, when most of the personages actually flourished. The time occupied by the action is Three Nights and Three Days.