[Footnote 60:  The Antiquary, chap. x.]

CHAPTER XVII.

THE END OF THE STRUGGLE.

Sir Walter certainly left his “name unstained,” unless the serious mistakes natural to a sanguine temperament such as his, are to be counted as stains upon his name; and if they are, where among the sons of men would you find many unstained names as noble as his with such a stain upon it?  He was not only sensitively honourable in motive, but, when he found what evil his sanguine temper had worked, he used his gigantic powers to repair it, as Samson used his great strength to repair the mischief he had inadvertently done to Israel.  But with all his exertions he had not, when death came upon him, cleared off much more than half his obligations.  There was still 54,000_l._ to pay.  But of this, 22,000_l._ was secured in an insurance on his life, and there were besides a thousand pounds or two in the hands of the trustees, which had not been applied to the extinction of the debt.  Mr. Cadell, his publisher, accordingly advanced the remaining 30,000_l._ on the security of Sir Walter’s copyrights, and on the 21st February, 1833, the general creditors were paid in full, and Mr. Cadell remained the only creditor of the estate.  In February, 1847, Sir Walter’s son, the second baronet, died childless; and in May, 1847, Mr. Cadell gave a discharge in full of all claims, including the bond for 10,000_l._ executed by Sir Walter during the struggles of Constable and Co. to prevent a failure, on the transfer to him of all the copyrights of Sir Walter, including “the results of some literary exertions of the sole surviving executor,” which I conjecture to mean the copyright of the admirable biography of Sir Walter Scott in ten volumes, to which I have made such a host of references—­probably the most perfect specimen of a biography rich in great materials, which our language contains.  And thus, nearly fifteen years after Sir Walter’s death, the debt which, within six years, he had more than half discharged, was at last, through the value of the copyrights he had left behind him, finally extinguished, and the small estate of Abbotsford left cleared.

Sir Walter’s effort to found a new house was even less successful than the effort to endow it.  His eldest son died childless.  In 1839 he went to Madras, as Lieutenant-Colonel of the 15th Hussars, and subsequently commanded that regiment.  He was as much beloved by the officers of his regiment as his father had been by his own friends, and was in every sense an accomplished soldier, and one whose greatest anxiety it was to promote the welfare of the privates as well as of the officers of his regiment.  He took great pains in founding a library for the soldiers of his corps, and his only legacy out of his own family was one of 100_l._ to this library.  The cause of his death was his having exposed himself rashly to the sun in a tiger-hunt, in August, 1846;