s private property, as well as 1300_l._ a year as Clerk of
Session, and 300_l._ more as Sheriff of Selkirk. Thus even his loss of
the price of several novels by Constable's failure would not seriously
have compromised Scott's position, but for his share in the
printing-house which fell with Constable, and the obligations of which
amounted to 117,000_l._

As Scott had always forestalled his income,--spending the
purchase-money of his poems and novels before they were written,--such
a failure as this, at the age of fifty-five, when all the freshness of
his youth was gone out of him, when he saw his son's prospects
blighted as well as his own, and knew perfectly that James Ballantyne,
unassisted by him, could never hope to pay any fraction of the debt
worth mentioning, would have been paralysing, had he not been a man of
iron nerve, and of a pride and courage hardly ever equalled. Domestic
calamity, too, was not far off. For two years he had been watching the
failure of his wife's health with increasing anxiety, and as
calamities seldom come single, her illness took a most serious form at
the very time when the blow fell, and she died within four months of
the failure. Nay, Scott was himself unwell at the critical moment, and
was taking sedatives which discomposed his brain. Twelve days before
the final failure,--which was announced to him on the 17th January,
1826,--he enters in his diary, "Much alarmed. I had walked till twelve
with Skene and Russell, and then sat down to my work. To my horror and
surprise I could neither write nor spell, but put down one word for
another, and wrote nonsense. I was much overpowered at the same time
and could not conceive the reason. I fell asleep, however, in my
chair, and slept for two hours. On my waking my head was clearer, and
I began to recollect that last night I had taken the anodyne left for
the purpose by Clarkson, and being disturbed in the course of the
night, I had not slept it off." In fact the hyoscyamus had, combined
with his anxieties, given him a slight attack of what is now called
_aphasia_, that brain disease the most striking symptom of which is
that one word is mistaken for another. And this was Scott's
preparation for his failure, and the bold resolve which followed it,
to work for his creditors as he had worked for himself, and to pay
off, if possible, the whole 117,000_l._ by his own literary exertions.

There is nothing in its way in the whole of English biograp