poor people whom I loved so well! There is just another die to
turn up against me in this run of ill-luck, i. e. if I should break my
magic wand in the fall from this elephant, and lose my popularity with my
fortune. Then _Woodstock_ and _Boney_" [his life of Napoleon] "may both go
to the paper-maker, and I may take to smoking cigars and drinking grog, or
turn devotee and intoxicate the brain another way."[52] He adds that when
he sets to work doggedly, he is exactly the same man he ever was, "neither
low-spirited nor _distrait_," nay, that adversity is to him "a tonic and
bracer."

The heaviest blow was, I think, the blow to his pride. Very early he
begins to note painfully the different way in which different friends
greet him, to remark that some smile as if to say, "think nothing
about it, my lad, it is quite out of our thoughts;" that others adopt
an affected gravity, "such as one sees and despises at a funeral," and
the best-bred "just shook hands and went on." He writes to Mr. Morritt
with a proud indifference, clearly to some extent simulated:--"My
womenkind will be the greater sufferers, yet even they look cheerily
forward; and, for myself, the blowing off of my hat on a stormy day
has given me more uneasiness."[53] To Lady Davy he writes truly
enough:--"I beg my humblest compliments to Sir Humphrey, and tell him,
Ill Luck, that direful chemist, never put into his crucible a more
indissoluble piece of stuff than your affectionate cousin and sincere
well-wisher, Walter Scott."[54] When his _Letters of Malachi
Malagrowther_ came out he writes:--"I am glad of this bruilzie, as far
as I am concerned; people will not dare talk of me as an object of
pity--no more 'poor-manning.' Who asks how many punds Scots the old
champion had in his pocket when

'He set a bugle to his mouth,
And blew so loud and shrill,
The trees in greenwood shook thereat,
Sae loud rang every hill.'

This sounds conceited enough, yet is not far from truth."[55] His dread
of pity is just the same when his wife dies:--"Will it be better," he
writes, "when left to my own feelings, I see the whole world pipe and
dance around me? I think it will. Their sympathy intrudes on my
present affliction." Again, on returning for the first time from
Edinburgh to Abbotsford after Lady Scott's funeral:--"I again took
possession of the family bedroom and my widowed couch. This was a sore
trial, but it was necessary not to blink such a reso