ormous burden of work under which he
seemed to move so lightly, was telling on him. _The Bride of
Lammermoor_, _The Legend of Montrose_, and _Ivanhoe_, had all of them
been dictated between screams of pain, wrung from his lips by a chronic
cramp of the stomach. By the time he reached _Redgauntlet_ and _St.
Ronan's Well_, there began to be heard faint murmurings of discontent
from his public, hints that he was writing too fast, and that the noble
wine he had poured them for so long was growing at last a trifle watery.
To add to these causes of uneasiness, the commercial ventures in which
he was interested drifted again into a precarious state. He had himself
fallen into the bad habit of forestalling the gains from his novels by
heavy drafts on his publishers, and the example thus set was followed
faithfully by John Ballantyne. Scott's good humor and his partner's bad
judgment saddled the concern with a lot of unsalable books. In 1818 the
affairs of the book-selling business had to be closed up, Constable
taking over the unsalable stock and assuming the outstanding liabilities
in return for copyright privileges covering some of Scott's novels.
This so burdened the veteran publisher that when, in 1825, a large
London firm failed, it carried him down also--and with him James
Ballantyne, with whom he had entered into close relations. Scott's
secret connection with Ballantyne had continued; accordingly he woke up
one fine day to find himself worse than beggared, being personally
liable for one hundred and thirty thousand pounds.

IV

The years intervening between this calamity and Scott's death form one
of the saddest and at the same time most heroic chapters in the history
of literature. The fragile health of Lady Scott succumbed almost
immediately to the crushing blow, and she died in a few months. Scott
surrendered Abbotsford to his creditors and took up humble lodgings in
Edinburgh. Here, with a pride and stoical courage as quiet as it was
splendid, he settled down to fill with the earnings of his pen the vast
gulf of debt for which he was morally scarcely responsible at all. In
three years he wrote _Woodstock_, three _Chronicles of the Canongate_,
the _Fair Maid of Perth_, _Anne of Geierstein_, the first series of the
_Tales of a Grandfather_, and a _Life of Napoleon_, equal to thirteen
volumes of novel size, besides editing and annotating a complete edition
of his own works. All these together netted his creditors L4