of Dryden and of Swift, the Life of Napoleon, in nine volumes, and a large number of articles for the reviews and magazines.  It was an extraordinary amount of literary work, but it was not quite so rapid and spontaneous as it seemed.  He had been very diligent in looking up old records, and we must remember that, in nearly all his poems and novels, Scott was drawing upon a fund of legend, tradition, history, and poetry, which he had been gathering for forty years, and which his memory enabled him to produce at will with almost the accuracy of an encyclopedia.

For the first six years Scott held himself to Scottish history, giving us in nine remarkable novels the whole of Scotland, its heroism, its superb faith and enthusiasm, and especially its clannish loyalty to its hereditary chiefs; giving us also all parties and characters, from Covenanters to Royalists, and from kings to beggars.  After reading these nine volumes we know Scotland and Scotchmen as we can know them in no other way.  In 1819 he turned abruptly from Scotland, and in Ivanhoe, the most popular of his works, showed what a mine of neglected wealth lay just beneath the surface of English history.  It is hard to realize now, as we read its rapid, melodramatic action, its vivid portrayal of Saxon and Norman character, and all its picturesque details, that it was written rapidly, at a time when the author was suffering from disease and could hardly repress an occasional groan from finding its way into the rapid dictation.  It stands to-day as the best example of the author’s own theory that the will of a man is enough to hold him steadily, against all obstacles, to the task of “doing what he has a mind to do.” Kenilworth, Nigel, Peveril, and Woodstock, all written in the next few years, show his grasp of the romantic side of English annals; Count Robert and The Talisman show his enthusiasm for the heroic side of the Crusaders’ nature; and Quentin Durward and Anne of Geierstein suggest another mine of romance which he discovered in French history.

For twenty years Scott labored steadily at literature, with the double object of giving what was in him, and of earning large sums to support the lavish display which he deemed essential to a laird of Scotland.  In 1826, while he was blithely at work on Woodstock, the crash came.  Not even the vast earnings of all these popular novels could longer keep the wretched business of Ballantyne on its feet, and the firm failed, after years of mismanagement.  Though a silent partner, Scott assumed full responsibility, and at fifty-five years of age, sick, suffering, and with all his best work behind him, he found himself facing a debt of over half a million dollars.  The firm could easily have compromised with its creditors; but Scott refused to hear of bankruptcy laws under which he could have taken refuge.  He assumed the entire debt as a personal one, and set resolutely to work