Sir Walter’s troubles began, which really scorched up her life.  That she did not feel with the depth and intensity of her husband, or in the same key of feeling, is clear.  After the failure, and during the preparations for abandoning the house in Edinburgh, Scott records in his diary:—­“It is with a sense of pain that I leave behind a parcel of trumpery prints and little ornaments, once the pride of Lady Scott’s heart, but which she saw consigned with indifference to the chance of an auction.  Things that have had their day of importance with me, I cannot forget, though the merest trifles; but I am glad that she, with bad health, and enough to vex her, has not the same useless mode of associating recollections with this unpleasant business."[9]

Poor Lady Scott!  It was rather like a bird of paradise mating with an eagle.  Yet the result was happy on the whole; for she had a thoroughly kindly nature, and a true heart.  Within ten days before her death, Scott enters in his diary:—­“Still welcoming me with a smile, and asserting she is better.”  She was not the ideal wife for Scott; but she loved him, sunned herself in his prosperity, and tried to bear his adversity cheerfully.  In her last illness she would always reproach her husband and children for their melancholy faces, even when that melancholy was, as she well knew, due to the approaching shadow of her own death.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 8:  Lockhart’s Life of Scott, ix. 183-4.]

[Footnote 9:  Lockhart’s Life of Scott, viii. 273.]

CHAPTER IV.

EARLIEST POETRY AND BORDER MINSTRELSY.

Scott’s first serious attempt in poetry was a version of Buerger’s Lenore, a spectre-ballad of the violent kind, much in favour in Germany at a somewhat earlier period, but certainly not a specimen of the higher order of imaginative genius.  However, it stirred Scott’s youthful blood, and made him “wish to heaven he could get a skull and two cross-bones!” a modest desire, to be expressed with so much fervour, and one almost immediately gratified.  Probably no one ever gave a more spirited version of Buerger’s ballad than Scott has given; but the use to which Miss Cranstoun, a friend and confidante of his love for Miss Stuart Belches, strove to turn it, by getting it printed, blazoned, and richly bound, and presenting it to the young lady as a proof of her admirer’s abilities, was perhaps hardly very sagacious.  It is quite possible, at least, that Miss Stuart Belches may have regarded this vehement admirer of spectral wedding journeys and skeleton bridals, as unlikely to prepare for her that comfortable, trim, and decorous future which young ladies usually desire.  At any rate, the bold stroke failed.  The young lady admired the verses, but, as we have seen, declined the translator.  Perhaps she regarded banking as safer, if less brilliant work than the