lution. Indeed I
do not like to have it thought that there is any way in which I can be
beaten." And again:--"I have a secret pride--I fancy it will be so
most truly termed--which impels me to mix with my distresses strange
snatches of mirth, 'which have no mirth in them.'"[56]

But though pride was part of Scott's strength, pride alone never
enabled any man to struggle so vigorously and so unremittingly as he
did to meet the obligations he had incurred. When he was in Ireland in
the previous year, a poor woman who had offered to sell him
gooseberries, but whose offer had not been accepted, remarked, on
seeing his daughter give some pence to a beggar, that they might as
well give her an alms too, as she was "an old struggler." Sir Walter
was struck with the expression, and said that it deserved to become
classical, as a name for those who take arms against a sea of
troubles, instead of yielding to the waves. It was certainly a name
the full meaning of which he himself deserved. His house in Edinburgh
was sold, and he had to go into a certain Mrs. Brown's lodgings, when
he was discharging his duties as Clerk of Session. His wife was dead.
His estate was conveyed to trustees for the benefit of his creditors
till such time as he should pay off Ballantyne and Co's. debt, which
of course in his lifetime he never did. Yet between January, 1826, and
January, 1828, he earned for his creditors very nearly 40,000_l._
_Woodstock_ sold for 8228_l._, "a matchless sale," as Sir Walter
remarked, "for less than three months' work." The first two editions
of _The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte_, on which Mr. Lockhart says that
Scott had spent the unremitting labour of about two years--labour
involving a far greater strain on eyes and brain than his imaginative
work ever caused him--sold for 18,000_l._ Had Sir Walter's health
lasted, he would have redeemed his obligations on behalf of Ballantyne
and Co. within eight or nine years at most from the time of his
failure. But what is more remarkable still, is that after his health
failed he struggled on with little more than half a brain, but a
whole will, to work while it was yet day, though the evening was
dropping fast. _Count Robert of Paris_ and _Castle Dangerous_ were
really the compositions of a paralytic patient.

It was in September, 1830, that the first of these tales was begun. As
early as the 15th February of that year he had had his first true
paralytic seizure. He had been dischar