Even those great men who are usually spoken of as if they had rounded off their career were really premature in their end.  Thackeray, for example, in spite of his snowy head, was only 52; Dickens attained the age of 58; on the whole, Sir Walter, with his 61 years of life, although he never wrote a novel until he was over 40, had, fortunately for the world, a longer working career than most of his brethren.

He employed his creative faculty for about twenty years, which is as much, I suppose, as Shakespeare did.  The bard of Avon is another example of the limited tenure which Genius has of life, though I believe that he outlived the greater part of his own family, who were not a healthy stock.  He died, I should judge, of some nervous disease; that is shown by the progressive degeneration of his signature.  Probably it was locomotor ataxy, which is the special scourge of the imaginative man.  Heine, Daudet, and how many more, were its victims.  As to the tradition, first mentioned long after his death, that he died of a fever contracted from a drinking bout, it is absurd on the face of it, since no such fever is known to science.  But a very moderate drinking bout would be extremely likely to bring a chronic nervous complaint to a disastrous end.

One other remark upon Scott before I pass on from that line of green volumes which has made me so digressive and so garrulous.  No account of his character is complete which does not deal with the strange, secretive vein which ran through his nature.  Not only did he stretch the truth on many occasions in order to conceal the fact that he was the author of the famous novels, but even intimate friends who met him day by day were not aware that he was the man about whom the whole of Europe was talking.  Even his wife was ignorant of his pecuniary liabilities until the crash of the Ballantyne firm told her for the first time that they were sharers in the ruin.  A psychologist might trace this strange twist of his mind in the numerous elfish Fenella-like characters who flit about and keep their irritating secret through the long chapters of so many of his novels.

It’s a sad book, Lockhart’s “Life.”  It leaves gloom in the mind.  The sight of this weary giant, staggering along, burdened with debt, overladen with work, his wife dead, his nerves broken, and nothing intact but his honour, is one of the most moving in the history of literature.  But they pass, these clouds, and all that is left is the memory of the supremely noble man, who would not be bent, but faced Fate to the last, and died in his tracks without a whimper.  He sampled every human emotion.  Great was his joy and great his success, great was his downfall and bitter his grief.  But of all the sons of men I don’t think there are many greater than he who lies under the great slab at Dryburgh.

III.