he never recovered from the fever which was the immediate consequence.  Ordered home for his health, he died near the Cape of Good Hope, on the 8th of February, 1847.  His brother Charles died before him.  He was rising rapidly in the diplomatic service, and was taken to Persia by Sir John MacNeill, on a diplomatic mission, as attache and private secretary.  But the climate struck him down, and he died at Teheran, almost immediately on his arrival, on the 28th October, 1841.  Both the sisters had died previously.  Anne Scott, the younger of the two, whose health had suffered greatly during the prolonged anxiety of her father’s illness, died on the Midsummer-day of the year following her father’s death; and Sophia, Mrs. Lockhart, died on the 17th May, 1837.  Sir Walter’s eldest grandchild, John Hugh Lockhart, for whom the Tales of a Grandfather were written, died before his grandfather; indeed Sir Walter heard of the child’s death at Naples.  The second son, Walter Scott Lockhart Scott, a lieutenant in the army, died at Versailles, on the 10th January, 1853.  Charlotte Harriet Jane Lockhart, who was married in 1847 to James Robert Hope-Scott, and succeeded to the Abbotsford estate, died at Edinburgh, on the 26th October, 1858, leaving three children, of whom only one survives.  Walter Michael and Margaret Anne Hope-Scott both died in infancy.  The only direct descendant, therefore, of Sir Walter Scott, is now Mary Monica Hope-Scott who was born on the 2nd October, 1852, the grandchild of Mrs. Lockhart, and the great-grandchild of the founder of Abbotsford.

There is something of irony in such a result of the Herculean labours of Scott to found and endow a new branch of the clan of Scott.  When fifteen years after his death the estate was at length freed from debt, all his own children and the eldest of his grandchildren were dead; and now forty-six years have elapsed, and there only remains one girl of his descendants to borrow his name and live in the halls of which he was so proud.  And yet this, and this only, was wanting to give something of the grandeur of tragedy to the end of Scott’s great enterprise.  He valued his works little compared with the house and lands which they were to be the means of gaining for his descendants; yet every end for which he struggled so gallantly is all but lost, while his works have gained more of added lustre from the losing battle which he fought so long, than they could ever have gained from his success.

What there was in him of true grandeur could never have been seen, had the fifth act of his life been less tragic than it was.  Generous, large-hearted, and magnanimous as Scott was, there was something in the days of his prosperity that fell short of what men need for their highest ideal of a strong man.  Unbroken success, unrivalled popularity, imaginative effort flowing almost as steadily as the current of a stream,—­these are characteristics, which, even when enhanced as they were in his case, by the