THE END
The sufferer reached London on June 13, 1832. On July 7 he took ship for Leith. On July 11 he travelled by carriage to Abbotsford, waking from his torpor as they drove down Gala water, past Torwoodlee. Arrived, his dogs welcomed him, and “he alternately sobbed and smiled over them till sleep oppressed him.” In his last days he was heard to murmur passages from the Bible, the Litany, the Scottish metrical psalms, and the Stabat Mater Dolorosa. It was on September 17 that he bade Lockhart “be a good man, my dear, be virtuous, be religious, be a good man.” On the twenty-first “he breathed his last in the presence of all his children. It was a beautiful day—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.”
He sleeps, with Lockhart at his feet, where the sound of the Border water fills the roofless aisles of the abbey of Dryburgh.
* * * *
“Good-night, Sir Walter!”
Scott had given his life to pay his debts. Of these he actually repaid about £70,000 between 1826 and 1832. The rest was wiped away by his copyrights, through the spirited and judicious management of Mr. Cadell, by the exertions of Lockhart as editor, and by the profits of Lockhart’s Life of Scott. As to the later fortunes of Sir Walter’s family, but one of his grandchildren survived; she married Mr. Hope Scott, the eminent barrister, and was the mother of the Honourable Mrs. Maxwell-Scott, an only child, spes exigua et extrema. This lady has evinced the ancestral love of history in her works, The Tragedy of Fotheringhay, in her essays, entitled The Making of Abbotsford, and in her recent brief book on Jeanne d’Arc. One of her sons has done honour to the houses of Maxwell and Scott by his distinguished services in the war in South Africa. Thus the long descended name of the great cadet of Harden has not vanished from the Border.
CONCLUSION
The character of Scott, and his place in literature, do not demand much discussion after all that has already been said. He was born to be at once a dweller in the realm of dreams, these dreams being mainly “retrocognitive” of the historic past; and a man of action and of this world; while he had a superabundance of joyous vitality, which overflowed into humorous rhyme, even in his worst hours of cerebral disease, and which inspired at once the central error of his life and the resolute sacrifice of life to honour. These elements of character were, all of them, carried to a pitch unusually high, while their combination, and their union with the most kindly nature, are unprecedented. This vitality, and this unfailing and universal sympathy, made friends for Scott of all sentient creatures, from men, women and children of every rank, to the pig which joined the pack of many dogs and one cat, old Hinse, that scoured the woods with him, and to the strangely sentimental hen which attached itself to Sir Walter. From George IV.—who admired and never turned on Scott—to the hedgers and ditchers on Abbotsford, Scott was endeared to all; in his ruin his old servants refused to leave him, and the music master of his daughters offered him the entire savings of his life. Yet there was no mawkish good nature in Scott; when he bent the heavy arches of his brows the Ettrick Shepherd himself felt that he must “gang warily.” No man was served as he was by his household, and when he told his son that certain conduct would entail his highest displeasure, the young man knew the full meaning of the phrase.
CONCLUSION
Scott’s courtesy was spontaneous and universal—he spoke to all “as if he was their blood relation”—except when he deliberately meant to be discourteous, in one case, to Lord Holland, who had done no more than his duty. He had come athwart the interests of Scott’s brother Thomas, and Scott took up the feud in the ancient spirit of clanship. Yet he lived to pronounce Lord Holland “the most agreeable man he ever knew. In criticism, in poetry, he beats those whose whole study they have been.” Thus Scott must have expiated an error produced by political heat as well as by personal resentment; probably, like the Baron Bradwardine, he sent “Letters of Slains,” or other atonement. Jeffrey says that “this was the only example of rudeness in Scott that he ever witnessed in the course of a lifelong familiarity.” In this lonely case, the person “cut like an old pen” was a man of title and distinction.