For that reason his life is good reading, and there it is on the same shelf as the novels.  Lockhart was, of course, his son-in-law and his admiring friend.  The ideal biographer should be a perfectly impartial man, with a sympathetic mind, but a stern determination to tell the absolute truth.  One would like the frail, human side of a man as well as the other.  I cannot believe that anyone in the world was ever quite so good as the subject of most of our biographies.  Surely these worthy people swore a little sometimes, or had a keen eye for a pretty face, or opened the second bottle when they would have done better to stop at the first, or did something to make us feel that they were men and brothers.  They need not go the length of the lady who began a biography of her deceased husband with the words—­“D—–­ was a dirty man,” but the books certainly would be more readable, and the subjects more lovable too, if we had greater light and shade in the picture.

But I am sure that the more one knew of Scott the more one would have admired him.  He lived in a drinking age, and in a drinking country, and I have not a doubt that he took an allowance of toddy occasionally of an evening which would have laid his feeble successors under the table.  His last years, at least, poor fellow, were abstemious enough, when he sipped his barley-water, while the others passed the decanter.  But what a high-souled chivalrous gentleman he was, with how fine a sense of honour, translating itself not into empty phrases, but into years of labour and denial!  You remember how he became sleeping partner in a printing house, and so involved himself in its failure.  There was a legal, but very little moral, claim against him, and no one could have blamed him had he cleared the account by a bankruptcy, which would have enabled him to become a rich man again within a few years.  Yet he took the whole burden upon himself and bore it for the rest of his life, spending his work, his time, and his health in the one long effort to save his honour from the shadow of a stain.  It was nearly a hundred thousand pounds, I think, which he passed on to the creditors—­a great record, a hundred thousand pounds, with his life thrown in.

And what a power of work he had!  It was superhuman.  Only the man who has tried to write fiction himself knows what it means when it is recorded that Scott produced two of his long novels in one single year.  I remember reading in some book of reminiscences—­on second thoughts it was in Lockhart himself—­how the writer had lodged in some rooms in Castle Street, Edinburgh, and how he had seen all evening the silhouette of a man outlined on the blind of the opposite house.  All evening the man wrote, and the observer could see the shadow hand conveying the sheets of paper from the desk to the pile at the side.  He went to a party and returned, but still the hand was moving the sheets.  Next morning he was told that the rooms opposite were occupied by Walter Scott.