which he had never, except technically,
incurred, and he actually in the remaining years of his life cleared off
the greater part of them. It was at the cost of his life itself. His
wife died, his children were scattered; but he worked on till the
thankless, hopeless toil broke down his strength, and after a fruitless
visit to Italy, he returned, to die at Abbotsford on 21st September
1832.

Scott's poetry has gone through various stages of estimate, and it can
hardly be said even now, a hundred years after the publication of his
first verses, to have attained the position, practically accepted by all
but paradoxers, which in that time a poet usually gains, unless, as the
poets of the seventeenth century did in the eighteenth, he falls, owing
to some freak of popular taste, out of really critical consideration
altogether. The immense popularity which it at first obtained has been
noted, as well as the fact that it was only ousted from that popularity
by, so to speak, a variety of itself. But the rise of Byron in the long
run did it far less harm than the long-delayed vogue of Wordsworth and
Coleridge and the success even of the later schools, of which Tennyson
was at once the pioneer and the commander-in-chief. At an uncertain time
in the century, but comparatively early, it became fashionable to take
Scott's verse as clever and spirited improvisation, to dwell on its
over-fluency and facility, its lack of passages in the grand style
(whatever the grand style may be), to indicate its frequent blemishes in
strictly correct form and phrase. And it can hardly be said that there
has been much reaction from this tone among professed and competent
critics.

To a certain extent, indeed, this undervaluation is justified, and Scott
himself, who was more free from literary vanity than any man of letters
of whom we have record, pleaded guilty again and again. Dropping as he
did almost by accident on a style which had absolutely no forerunners in
elaborate formal literature, a style almost absolutely destitute of any
restrictions or limits, in which the length of lines and stanzas, the
position of rhymes, the change from narrative to dialogue, and so forth,
depended wholly and solely on the caprice of the author, it would have
been extremely strange if a man whose education had been a little
lacking in scholastic strictness, and who began to write at a time when
the first object of almost every writer was to burst old bonds, had