0,000.
Touched by the efforts he was making to settle their claims, they now
presented him with Abbotsford, and thither he returned to spend the few
years remaining to him. In 1830 he suffered a first stroke of paralysis;
refusing to give up, however, he made one more desperate rally to
recapture his old power of story-telling. _Count Robert of Paris_ and
_Castle Dangerous_ were the pathetic result; they are not to be taken
into account, in any estimate of his powers, for they are manifestly the
work of a paralytic patient. The gloomy picture is darkened by an
incident which illustrates strikingly one phase of Scott's character.

The great Reform Bill was being discussed throughout Scotland, menacing
what were really abuses, but what Scott, with his intense conservatism,
believed to be sacred and inviolable institutions. The dying man roused
himself to make a stand against the abominable bill. In a speech which
he made at Jedburgh, he was hissed and hooted by the crowd, and he left
the town with the dastardly cry of "Burk Sir Walter!" ringing in his
ears.

Nature now intervened to ease the intolerable strain. Scott's anxiety
concerning his debt gradually gave way to an hallucination that it had
all been paid. His friends took advantage of the quietude which followed
to induce him to make the journey to Italy, in the fear that the severe
winter of Scotland would prove fatal. A ship of His Majesty's fleet was
put at his disposal, and he set sail for Malta. The youthful
adventurousness of the man flared up again oddly for a moment, when he
insisted on being set ashore upon a volcanic island in the Mediterranean
which had appeared but a few days before and which sank beneath the
surface shortly after. The climate of Malta at first appeared to benefit
him; but when he heard, one day, of the death of Goethe at Weimar, he
seemed seized with a sudden apprehension of his own end, and insisted
upon hurrying back through Europe, in order that he might look once more
on Abbotsford. On the ride from Edinburgh he remained for the first two
stages entirely unconscious. But as the carriage entered the valley of
the Gala he opened his eyes and murmured the name of objects as they
passed, "Gala water, surely--Buckholm--Torwoodlee." When the towers of
Abbotsford came in view, he was so filled with delight that he could
scarcely be restrained from leaping out. At the gates he greeted
faithful Laidlaw in a voice strong and hearty as of old