But though pride was part of Scott’s strength, pride alone never enabled any man to struggle so vigorously and so unremittingly as he did to meet the obligations he had incurred.  When he was in Ireland in the previous year, a poor woman who had offered to sell him gooseberries, but whose offer had not been accepted, remarked, on seeing his daughter give some pence to a beggar, that they might as well give her an alms too, as she was “an old struggler.”  Sir Walter was struck with the expression, and said that it deserved to become classical, as a name for those who take arms against a sea of troubles, instead of yielding to the waves.  It was certainly a name the full meaning of which he himself deserved.  His house in Edinburgh was sold, and he had to go into a certain Mrs. Brown’s lodgings, when he was discharging his duties as Clerk of Session.  His wife was dead.  His estate was conveyed to trustees for the benefit of his creditors till such time as he should pay off Ballantyne and Co’s. debt, which of course in his lifetime he never did.  Yet between January, 1826, and January, 1828, he earned for his creditors very nearly 40,000_l._ Woodstock sold for 8228_l._, “a matchless sale,” as Sir Walter remarked, “for less than three months’ work.”  The first two editions of The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, on which Mr. Lockhart says that Scott had spent the unremitting labour of about two years—­labour involving a far greater strain on eyes and brain than his imaginative work ever caused him—­sold for 18,000_l._ Had Sir Walter’s health lasted, he would have redeemed his obligations on behalf of Ballantyne and Co. within eight or nine years at most from the time of his failure.  But what is more remarkable still, is that after his health failed he struggled on with little more than half a brain, but a whole will, to work while it was yet day, though the evening was dropping fast. Count Robert of Paris and Castle Dangerous were really the compositions of a paralytic patient.

It was in September, 1830, that the first of these tales was begun.  As early as the 15th February of that year he had had his first true paralytic seizure.  He had been discharging his duties as clerk of session as usual, and received in the afternoon a visit from a lady friend of his, Miss Young, who was submitting to him some manuscript memoirs of her father, when the stroke came.  It was but slight.  He struggled against it with his usual iron power of will, and actually managed to stagger out of the room where the lady was sitting with him, into the drawing-room where his daughter was, but there he fell his full length on the floor.  He was cupped, and fully recovered his speech during the course of the day, but Mr. Lockhart thinks that never, after this attack, did his style recover its full lucidity and terseness.  A cloudiness in words and a cloudiness of arrangement began to be visible.  In the course of the year he retired from his duties of clerk of session, and his publishers