me such as perhaps no British man of
letters has ever attained during his lifetime. He had for a time been the
most admired poet of his day, and though latterly somewhat eclipsed by
Byron, he still retained great fame as a poet. He also possessed a great
reputation as an antiquary, one of the chief revivers of interest in our
ancient literature, and as the biographer and ed. of several of our great
writers; while the incognito which he maintained in regard to his novels
was to many a very partial veil. The unprecedented profits of his
writings had made him, as he believed, a man of wealth; his social
prestige was immense; he had in 1820 been made a baronet, when that was
still a real distinction, and he had been the acknowledged representative
of his country when the King visited it in 1822. All this was now to
change, and the fabric of prosperity which he had raised by his genius
and labour, and which had never spoiled the simplicity and generosity of
his character, was suddenly to crumble into ruin with, however, the
result of revealing him as the possessor of qualities even greater and
nobler than any he had shown in his happier days. The publishing and
printing firms with which he had been connected fell in the commercial
crisis of 1826, and S. found himself at 55, and with failing health,
involved in liabilities amounting to L130,000. Never was adversity more
manfully and gallantly met. Notwithstanding the crushing magnitude of the
disaster and the concurrent sorrow of his wife's illness, which soon
issued in her death, he deliberately set himself to the herculean task of
working off his debts, asking only that time might be given him. The
secret of his authorship was now, of course, revealed, and his efforts
were crowned with a marvellous measure of success. _Woodstock_, his first
publication after the crash, appeared in the same year and brought L8000;
by 1828 he had earned L40,000. In 1827 _The Two Drovers_, _The Highland
Widow_, and _The Surgeon's Daughter_, forming the first series of
_Chronicles of the Canongate_, appeared together with _The Life of
Napoleon_ in 9 vols., and the first series of _Tales of a Grandfather_;
in 1828 _The Fair Maid of Perth_ and the second series of _Tales of a
Grandfather_, _Anne of Geierstein_, a third series of the _Tales_, and
the commencement of a complete ed. of the novels in 1829; a fourth and
last series of _Tales_, _History of Scotland_, and other work in 1830.
Then at last