FRUITLESS JOURNEY.—­In order to divert his mind, and, as a last chance for health, a trip to the Mediterranean was projected.  The Barham frigate was placed by the government at his disposal; and he wandered with a party of friends to Malta, Naples, Pompeii, Paestum, and Rome.  But feeling the end approaching, he exclaimed, “Let us to Abbotsford:”  for the final hour he craved the grata quies patriae; to which an admiring world has added the remainder of the verse—­sed et omnis terra sepulchrum.  It was not a moment too soon:  he travelled northward to the Rhine, down that river by boat, and reached London “totally exhausted;” thence, as soon as he could be moved, he was taken to Abbotsford.

RETURN AND DEATH.—­There he lingered from July to September, and died peacefully on the 21st of the latter month, surrounded by his family and lulled to repose by the rippling of the Tweed.  Among the noted dead of 1832, including Goethe, Cuvier, Crabbe, and Mackintosh, he was the most distinguished; and all Scotland and all the civilized world mourned his loss.

HIS FAME.—­At Edinburgh a colossal monument has been erected to his memory, within which sits his marble figure.  Numerous other memorial columns are found in other cities, but all Scotland is his true monument, every province and town of which he has touched with his magic pen.  Indeed, Scotland may be said to owe to him a new existence.  In the words of Lord Meadowbank,—­who presided at the Theatrical Fund dinner in 1827, and who there made the first public announcement of the authorship of the Waverley novels,—­Scott was “the mighty magician who rolled back the current of time, and conjured up before our living senses the men and manners of days which have long since passed away ...  It is he who has conferred a new reputation on our national character, and bestowed on Scotland an imperishable name.”

Besides his poetry and novels, he wrote very much of a miscellaneous character for the reviews, and edited the works of the poets with valuable introductions and congenial biographies.  Most of his fictions are historical in plot and personages; and those which deal with Scottish subjects are enriched by those types of character, those descriptions of manners—­national and local—­and those peculiarities of language, which give them additional and more useful historical value.  It has been justly said that, by his masterly handling of historical subjects, he has taught the later historians how to write, how to give vivid and pictorial effects to what was before a detail of chronology or a dry schedule of philosophy.  His critical powers may be doubted:  he was too kind and genial for a critic; and in reading contemporary authors seems to have endued their inferior works with something of his own fancy.

The Life of Scott, by his son-in-law, J. G. Lockhart, is one of the most complete and interesting biographies in the language.  In it the student will find a list of all his works, with the dates of their production; and will wonder that an author who was so rapid and so prolific could write so much that was of the highest excellence.  If not the greatest genius of his age, he was its greatest literary benefactor; and it is for this reason that we have given so much space to the record of his life and works.