[7.] His expenses in building Abbotsford, and his desire to acquire land, induced him to go into partnership with Ballantyne, his printer, and with Constable, his publisher. Both firms failed in the dark
year of 1826; and Scott found himself unexpectedly liable for the large sum of £147,000. Such a load of debt would have utterly crushed most men; but Scott stood clear and undaunted in front of it. “Gentlemen,” he said to his creditors, “time and I against any two. Let me take this good ally into my company, and I believe I shall be able to pay you every farthing.” He left his beautiful country house at Abbotsford; he gave up all his country pleasures; he surrendered all his property to his creditors; he took a small house in Edinburgh; and, in the short space of five years, he had paid off £130,000. But the task was too terrible; the pace had been too hard; and he was struck down by paralysis. But even this disaster did not daunt him. Again he went to work, and again he had a paralytic stroke. At last, however, he was obliged to give up; the Government of the day placed a royal frigate at his disposal; he went to Italy; but his health had utterly broken down, he felt he could get no good from the air of the south, and he turned his face towards home to die. He breathed his last breath at Abbotsford, in sight of his beloved Tweed, with his family around him, on the 21st of September 1832.
[8.] His poetry is the poetry of action. In imaginative power he ranks below no other poet, except Homer and Shakespeare. He delighted in war, in its movement, its pageantry, and its events; and, though lame, he was quartermaster of a volunteer corps of cavalry. On one occasion he rode to muster one hundred miles in twenty-four hours, composing verses by the way. Much of “Marmion” was composed on horseback. “I had many a grand gallop,” he says, “when I was thinking of ‘Marmion.’” His two chief powers in verse are his narrative and his pictorial power. His boyhood was passed in the Borderland of Scotland—“a district in which every field has its battle and every rivulet its song;” and he was at home in every part of the Highlands and the Lowlands, the Islands and the Borders, of his native country. But, both in his novels and his poems, he was a painter of action rather than of character.
[9.] His prose works are now much more read than his poems; but both are full of life, power, literary skill, knowledge of men and women, and strong sympathy with all past ages. He wrote so fast that his sentences are often loose and ungrammatical; but they are never unidiomatic or stiff. The rush of a strong and large life goes through them, and carries the reader along, forgetful of all minor blemishes. His best novels are Old Mortality and Kenilworth; his greatest romance is Ivanhoe.
[10.] Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), a true poet, and
a writer of noble prose, was born at Ottery St Mary, in Devonshire, in 1772. His father, who was vicar of the parish, and master of the grammar-school, died when the boy was only nine years of age. He was educated at Christ’s Hospital, in London, where his most famous schoolfellow was Charles Lamb; and from there he went to Jesus College, Cambridge. In 1793 he had fallen into debt at College; and, in despair, left Cambridge, and enlisted in the 15th Light Dragoons, under the name of Silas Tomkins Comberbatch. He was quickly discovered, and his discharge soon obtained. While on a visit to his friend Robert Southey, at Bristol, the plan of emigrating to the banks of the Susquehanna, in Pennsylvania, was entered on; but, when all the friends and fellow-emigrants were ready to start, it was discovered that no one of them had any money.—Coleridge finally became a literary man and journalist. His real power, however, lay in poetry; but by poetry he could not make a living. His first volume of poems was published at Bristol, in the year 1796; but it was not till 1798 that the Rime of the Ancient Mariner appeared in the ‘Lyrical Ballads.’ His next greatest poem, Christabel, though written in 1797, was not published till the year 1816. His other best poems are Love; Dejection—an Ode; and some of his shorter pieces. His best poetry was written about the close of the century: “Coleridge,” said Wordsworth, “was in blossom from 1796 to 1800.”—As a critic and prose-writer, he is one of the greatest men of his time. His best works in prose are The Friend and the Aids to Reflection. He died at Highgate, near London, in the year 1834.
[11.] His style, both in prose and in verse, marks the beginning of the modern era. His prose style is noble, elaborate, eloquent, and full of subtle and involved thought; his style in verse is always musical, and abounds in rhythms of the most startling and novel—yet always genuine—kind. Christabel is the poem that is most full of these fine musical rhythms.
[12.] Robert Southey (1774-1843), poet, reviewer, historian, but, above all, man of letters,—the friend of Coleridge and Wordsworth,—was born at Bristol in 1774. He was educated at Westminster School and at Balliol College, Oxford. After his marriage with Miss Edith Fricker—a sister of Sara, the wife of Coleridge—he settled at Greta Hall, near Keswick, in 1803; and resided there until his death in 1843. In 1813 he was created Poet-Laureate by George III.—He was the most indefatigable of writers. He wrote poetry before breakfast; history between breakfast and
dinner; reviews between dinner and supper; and, even when taking a constitutional, he had always a book in his hand, and walked along the road reading. He began to write and to publish at the age of nineteen; he never ceased writing till the year 1837, when his brain softened from the effects of perpetual labour.
[13.] Southey wrote a great deal of verse, but much more prose. His prose works amount to more than one hundred volumes; but his poetry, such as it is, will probably live longer than his prose. His best-known poems are Joan of Arc, written when he was nineteen; Thalaba the Destroyer, a poem in irregular and unrhymed verse; The Curse of Kehama, in verse rhymed, but irregular; and Roderick, the last of the Goths, written in blank verse. He will, however, always be best remembered by his shorter pieces, such as The Holly Tree, Stanzas written in My Library, and others.—His most famous prose work is the Life of Nelson. His prose style is always firm, clear, compact, and sensible.