nstead of admiration, fell upon Scott's life, that the
delicate tissue paper shrivelled up; nor does it seem that, even then,
it was the trouble, so much as a serious malady that had fixed on Lady
Scott before Sir Walter's troubles began, which really scorched up her
life. That she did not feel with the depth and intensity of her
husband, or in the same key of feeling, is clear. After the failure,
and during the preparations for abandoning the house in Edinburgh,
Scott records in his diary:--"It is with a sense of pain that I leave
behind a parcel of trumpery prints and little ornaments, once the
pride of Lady Scott's heart, but which she saw consigned with
indifference to the chance of an auction. Things that have had their
day of importance with me, I cannot forget, though the merest trifles;
but I am glad that she, with bad health, and enough to vex her, has
not the same useless mode of associating recollections with this
unpleasant business."[9]

Poor Lady Scott! It was rather like a bird of paradise mating with an
eagle. Yet the result was happy on the whole; for she had a thoroughly
kindly nature, and a true heart. Within ten days before her death,
Scott enters in his diary:--"Still welcoming me with a smile, and
asserting she is better." She was not the ideal wife for Scott; but
she loved him, sunned herself in his prosperity, and tried to bear his
adversity cheerfully. In her last illness she would always reproach
her husband and children for their melancholy faces, even when that
melancholy was, as she well knew, due to the approaching shadow of her
own death.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 8: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ix. 183-4.]

[Footnote 9: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, viii. 273.]

CHAPTER IV.

EARLIEST POETRY AND BORDER MINSTRELSY.

Scott's first serious attempt in poetry was a version of Buerger's
_Lenore_, a spectre-ballad of the violent kind, much in favour in
Germany at a somewhat earlier period, but certainly not a specimen of
the higher order of imaginative genius. However, it stirred Scott's
youthful blood, and made him "wish to heaven he could get a skull and
two cross-bones!" a modest desire, to be expressed with so much
fervour, and one almost immediately gratified. Probably no one ever
gave a more spirited version of Buerger's ballad than Scott has given;
but the use to which Miss Cranstoun, a friend and confidante of his
love for Miss Stuart Belches, strove to turn it, by getting it