This completes the list of Scott’s greater productions; but it should be remembered that during all the years of his creative work he was incessantly doing critical and historical writing,—­producing numerous reviews, essays, ballads; introductions to divers works; biographical sketches for Ballantyne’s “Novelist’s Library,”—­the works of fifteen celebrated English writers of fiction, Fielding, Smollett, etc.; letters and pamphlets; dramas; even a few religious discourses; and his very extensive and interesting private correspondence.  He was such a marvel of productive brain-power as has seldom, if ever, been known to humanity.

The illness and death of Scott’s beloved wife, but four short months after his commercial disaster, was a profound grief to him; and under the exhausting pressure of incessant work during the five years following, his bodily power began to fail,—­so that in October, 1831, after a paralytic shock, he stopped all literary labor and went to Italy for recuperation.  The following June he returned to London, weaker in both mind and body; was taken to Abbotsford in July; and on the 21st September, 1832, with his children about him, the kindly, manly, brave, and tender spirit passed away.

At the time of his death Sir Walter had reduced his great indebtedness to $270,000.  A life insurance of $110,000, $10,000 in the hands of his trustees, and $150,000 advanced by Robert Cadell, an Edinburgh bookseller, on the copyrights of Scott’s works, cleared away the last remnant of the debt; and within twenty years Cadell had reimbursed himself, and made a handsome profit for his own account and that of the family of Sir Walter.

The moneyed details of Scott’s literary life have been made a part of this brief sketch, both because his phenomenal fecundity and popularity offer a convenient measure of his power, and because the fiscal misfortune of his later life revealed a simple grandeur of character even more admirable than his mental force.  “Scott ruined!” exclaimed the Earl of Dudley when he heard of the trouble.  “The author of Waverley ruined!  Good God! let every man to whom he has given months of delight give him a sixpence, and he will rise to-morrow morning richer than Rothschild!” But the sturdy Scotchman accepted no dole; he set himself to work out his own salvation.  William Howitt, in his “Homes and Haunts of Eminent British Poets,” estimated that Scott’s works had produced as profits to the author or his trustees at least L500,000,—­nearly $2,500,000:  this in 1847, over fifty years ago, and only forty-five years from Scott’s first original publication.  Add the results of the past fifty years, and, remembering that this gives but the profits, conceive the immense sums that have been freely paid by the intelligent British public for their enjoyment of this great author’s writings.  Then, besides all this, recall the myriad volumes of Scott sold in America, which paid no profit to the author or his heirs.  There is no parallel.