Only once after this dreary party of pleasure did I return, many years later, to Abbotsford.  I was alone, and the tourist season was over, and the sad autumnal afternoon offering little prospect of my being joined by other sight-seers, I prevailed with the housekeeper, who admitted me, to let me wander about the place, without entering the house; and I spent a most melancholy hour in the garden and in pacing up and down the terrace overlooking the Tweed side.  The place was no longer inhabited at all; my ringing at the gate had brought, after much delay, a servant from Mr. Hope’s new residence, built at some distance from Scott’s house, and from her I learned that the proprietor of Abbotsford had withdrawn to the house he had erected for himself, leaving the poet’s dwelling exclusively as a place of pilgrimage for travelers and strangers, with not even a servant residing under its roof.  The house abandoned to curious wayfarers; the sons and daughters, the grandson and granddaughter, every member of the founder’s family dead; Mr. Hope remarried to a lady of the house of Arundel, and living in a semi-monastic seclusion in a house walled off from the tourist-haunted shrine of the great man whose memory alone was left to inhabit it,—­all these circumstances filled me with indescribable sadness as I paced up and down in the gloaming, and thought of the strange passion for founding here a family of the old Border type which had obfuscated the keen, clear brain of Walter Scott, made his wonderful gifts subservient to the most futile object of ambition, driven him to the verge of disgrace and bankruptcy, embittered the evening of his laborious and glorious career, and finally ended in this,—­the utter extinction of the name he had illustrated and the family he had hoped to found.  And while his noble works remain to make his memory ever loved and honored, this Brummagem mediaeval mansion, this mock feudal castle with its imitation baronial hall (upon a diminutive scale) hung round with suits of armor, testifies to the utter perversity of good sense and good taste resulting from this one mental infirmity, this craving to be a Border chieftain of the sixteenth century instead of an Edinburgh lawyer of the nineteenth, and his preference for the distinction of a petty landholder to that of the foremost genius of his age.  Mr. Combe, in speaking of this feudal insanity of Scott and the piteous havoc it made of his life, told me that at one time he and Ballantyne, with whom he had entered into partnership, were staving off imminent ruin by indorsing and accepting each other’s bills, and carried on that process to the extremest verge compatible with honesty.  What a history of astounding success and utter failure!

GLASGOW, July 3, 1830.