Castle Street house cannot have
cost, even with lavish hospitality, much to keep up, and the Abbotsford
establishment, though liberal, was never ostentatious. But when large
lump sums are constantly expended in purchases of land, building,
furnishing, and the like; when every penny of income except official
salaries goes through a complicated process of abatement in the way of
discounts for six and twelve months' bills, fines for renewal, payments
to banks for advances and the like--the 'clean' sums available at any
given moment bear quite fantastic and untrustworthy relations to their
nominal representatives. It may be strongly suspected, from the admitted
decrease of a very valuable practice under Walter Scott _pere_, and from
its practical disappearance under Thomas, that the genius of the Scott
family did not precisely lie in the management of money.

The marriage of Sophia Scott to Lockhart, and the purchase of a
commission for her eldest brother Walter in the 18th Hussars, made gaps
in Scott's family circle, and also, beyond all doubt, in his finances.
The first was altogether happy for him. It did not, for at anyrate some
years, absolutely sever him from the dearest of his children, a lady
who, to judge from her portraits, must have been of singular charm, and
who seems to have been the only one of the four with much of his mental
characteristics; it provided him with an agreeable companion, a loyal
friend, and an incomparable biographer. Of Sir Walter Scott the second
and last, not much personal idea is obtainable. The few anecdotes handed
down, and his father's letters to him (we have no replies), suggest a
good sort of person, slightly 'chuckle-headed' and perfervid in the
wrong places, with next to no intellectual gifts, and perhaps more his
mother's son than his father's. He had some difficulties in his first
regiment, which seems to have been a wild one, and not in the best form;
he married an heiress of the unpoetical name of Jobson, to whom and of
whom his father writes with a pretty old-fashioned affection and
courtesy, which perhaps gave Thackeray some traits for Colonel Newcome.
Of the younger brother Charles, an Oxford man, who went into the Foreign
Office, even less is recorded than of Walter. Anne Scott, the third of
the family, and the faithful attendant of her father in his last evil
days, died in her sister's house shortly after Sir Walter, and Mrs.
Lockhart herself followed before the _Life_ was