SCOTT MONUMENT, EDINBURGH
With superb courage he rose to the emergency. Assuming the entire burden, and struggling against almost insuperable difficulties, he succeeded in paying £63,000, or considerably more than half of the indebtedness. Life insurance of £22,000 and £2000 in the hands of his trustees reduced the debt to about £30,000, which sum was advanced by Cadell, the publisher. All the creditors, except the latter, were then paid in full, and in 1847, fifteen years after Scott's death, Cadell was paid by a transfer of copyrights and the entire obligation was thus finally extinguished.
Had Scott died at the time of the Constable failure, leaving his affairs to be settled by the ordinary process of the law, and the Ballantyne creditors unpaid, the world would never have known whether the unprecedented success of his literary labours was after all quite sufficient to counterbalance the disastrous failure of his business affairs.
The catastrophe, however, brought out all the sterling qualities of his character. How much courage he possessed, what a high sense of honour, what patience, what endurance, even his closest friends had never realized. Just as those kindly personal qualities had woven an indescribable charm into the products of his fancy, such as no other series of writings had ever before possessed, so the highest and noblest traits of his character responded to the call of a great emergency, and converted the failures of a lifetime into a final triumph.
THE END
INDEX
ABBOT, THE, [4], [10], [265-271]; [348].
Abbotsford, [39], [46], [89], [90], [133], [146], [220], [233], [346], [352], [360], [376], [394], [396], [397], [398], [399], [401], [402].