llion. But the fact of his doing so was sufficient
indication of the spirit in which he would meet the crash of Ballantyne
& Co. itself. The whole of the _Diary_ (_v. infra_) of the period is one
long illustration (without the slightest pretentiousness or
self-consciousness) of the famous line of perhaps his own greatest
poetical passage--

'No thought was there of dastard flight.'

He had made up his mind, before it was certainly imminent, that
bankruptcy was not to be accepted; evasion of any more thorough kind, if
it occurred, he dismissed at once as not even to be thought of. Yet it
is perhaps to be regretted that the mode in which the disaster was
actually met, heroic as it was, was substituted for that of which he had
at first thought--the simple throwing up of every scrap of his property,
including all but a bare subsistence out of his official incomes, which
could not have been touched without difficulty. Had he done, or been
able to do this, had he shaken off the vampire in stone and lime and
hungry soil which had so long sucked his blood, had he sold the library,
and the 'Gabions of Jonathan Oldbuck,'[35] and the Japanese papers, and
the Byron vase, and the armour, had he mortgaged his incomes by help of
insurance, sold his copyrights outright, and, in short, realised
everything, it does not seem absolutely certain that he might not have
paid off his creditors in full, or, at least, left but a small balance
to be discharged by less superhuman and fatal exertions than those
actually made. The time was not a good time for selling, no doubt; but,
on the other hand, the interest in Abbotsford and its master was still
at its height, and the enthusiasm, which actually inspired one anonymous
offer of thirty thousand pounds on loan in a lump, would probably have
made good bargains for him on sales. He would then have been a free, or
nearly a free man, with his own exertions untrammelled, or nearly so;
and, serious as were the warnings that his health had given or received,
the actual history of the next six or seven years seems to show that,
had the machine been driven with less unsparing ferocity, and at a more
moderate rate, it might have lasted for years, and even restored its
master to competence, if not to wealth.

Unfortunately, if nothing else--family affection and perhaps also family
pride did still, it may be feared, supply something else--the unlucky
settlement of Abbotsford stood in the way. Legally,