[533] Count Paul de Remusat has been good enough to give me another view of this visit which will be read with interest:—­“118 Faubourg St. Honore, February 10, 1890.—....  My father has often spoken to me of this visit to Sir Walter Scott—­for it was indeed my father, Charles de Remusat, member of the French Academy, and successively Minister of the Interior and for Foreign Affairs, who went at the age of thirty to Abbotsford, and he retained to the last days of his life a most lively remembrance of the great novelist who did not acknowledge the authorship of his novels, and to whom it was thus impossible otherwise than indirectly to pay any compliment.  It gives me great pleasure to learn that the visit of those young men impressed him favourably.  My father’s companion was his contemporary and friend, M. Louis de Guizard, who, like my father, was a contributor at that time to the Liberal press of the Restoration, the Globe and La Revue Francaise, and who, after the Revolution of 1830, entered, as did my father likewise, upon political life.  M. de Guizard was first prefet, then depute, and after 1848 became Directeur-general des Beaux Arts.  He died about 1877 or 1878, after his retirement from public life.”

[534] “Woodstock placed upwards of L8000 in the hands of Sir Walter’s creditors.  The Napoleon (first and second editions) produced for them a sum which it even now startles me to mention—­L18,000.  As by the time the historical work was published nearly half of the First Series of Chronicles of the Canongate had been written, it is obvious that the amount to which Scott’s literary industry, from the close of 1825 to the 10th of June 1827, had diminished his debt, cannot be stated at less than L28,000.  Had health been spared him, how soon must he have freed himself from all his encumbrances!”—­J.G.L.

[535] See Life, vol. vi. p. 89.  In Mr. Ballantyne’s Memorandum, there is a fuller account of the mode in which The Bride of Lammermoor, The Legend of Montrose, and almost the whole of Ivanhoe were produced, and the mental phenomenon which accompanied the preparation of the first-named work:—­

“During the progress of composing The Heart of Midlothian, The Bride of Lammermoor, and Legend of Montrose—­a period of many months—­Mr. Scott’s health had become extremely indifferent, and was often supposed to place him in great danger.  But it would hardly be credited, were it not for the notoriety of the fact, that although one of the symptoms of his illness was pain of the most acute description, yet he never allowed it to interrupt his labours.  The only difference it produced, that I am aware of, was its causing him to employ the hand of an amanuensis in place of his own.  Indeed, during the greater part of the day at this period he was confined to his bed.  The person employed for this purpose was the respectable