amily and his most
intimate friends did not know the facts--could come from nothing but a
sense of something amiss, and certainly led to the commission of not a
little that was so. Scott had to conceal the actual and very material
truth when he applied to the Duke of Buccleuch for the guarantee that
saved him a dozen years earlier. He had to conceal it from the various
persons who employed Ballantyne & Co., and were induced to do so by him.
He had to conceal it when he executed those settlements on his son's
marriage, which certainly would have been affected had it been known
that the whole of his fortune was subject to an unlimited liability. The
mystery of his unconsciousness of all this may be left pretty much
where Lockhart, with full acknowledgment, left it. I have said that his
action seems to have originated partly in a blind and causeless fear of
poverty, which, as blind and causeless fear so often does, made him run
into the very danger he tried to avoid, partly in an incomprehensible
partiality for the Ballantynes.[30] We have no evidence, in any degree
trustworthy, that during the entire term of his connection with the firm
he derived any positive profit from it at all commensurate with his
actual sinkings of money and his sacrifices and exertions of various
kinds. The whole thing is, once more, a mystery, and the best comment is
perhaps the simple one that the means which a man takes to ruin or
seriously damage himself generally do seem a mystery to others, and
probably are so to himself. Nor is there anything more unusual in the
colossal irony of the situation, when we find Scott, just before his own
ruin, and in the act of giving his friend Terry the actor a guarantee
(which, as it happened, he had to pay), writing[36] words of the most
excellent sense on the rashness of engaging in commercial undertakings
without sufficient capital, the madness of dealing in bills, and his own
resolve to have nothing to do with any business carried on 'by discounts
and renewals.' The irony, let it be repeated, is colossal; yet we meet
it, we commit it, every day.

It is painful to read that during the months of uncertainty which
preceded the actual crash, Scott threw the helve after the hatchet by
charging himself personally, first, with an advance, or, at least, bond
for L5000, and then for another of double that amount,[29] to help two
firms, Constable and Hurst & Robinson, whose combined indebtedness was
over half a mi