e state of the case. Every now and then--indeed,
for long passages--there is nothing very different from the matter to
which, since the first warning in 1818, we have been accustomed. Scott
is, if not the infinitely various but never mutable Scott of the earlier
years, still constant in fun and kindness, in quaint erudition and
hearty friendship, though he is all this in a slightly deadened and
sicklied degree. But there are strange breaks-down and unfamiliar
touches, now of almost querulous self-concern (the thing most foreign to
his earlier nature), as where he complains that his companions, his son
and daughter, 'are neither desirous to follow his amusements nor anxious
that he should adopt theirs'; now of still more foreign callousness, as
where he dismisses the news of the death of Hugh Littlejohn, whose
illnesses earlier had been almost his chief anxiety, and records in the
same entry that he 'went to the opera.' The passage in the Introduction
to the _Chronicles_, written not so very long before, traces with an
almost horrible exactness the changes which were now taking place in
himself. Moreover, he would resume the pen; and, first in Malta, then at
Naples, began and went far to complete two new novels, _The Siege of
Malta_ and _Il Bizarro_, which, I suppose, are still at Abbotsford, with
Lockhart's solemn curse on the person who shall publish them. He had now
(it does not seem clear on what grounds, or by what stages) confirmed
himself in the belief that he had paid off all his debts, instead of
nearly half of them.[37] And he founded divers schemes on the profits of
these works, added to the (as he thought) liberated returns of the
_Magnum_; and even revived his notions of buying Faldonside with its
thousand acres, and 'holding all Tweed-bank, from Ettrick-foot to Calla
weel.' Feted, too, as he was, and in this condition of mind, it seems to
have been difficult for his companions to make him observe the absolute
temperance in food and drink which was as necessary to the staving off
of the end as abstinence from brain-work; and it must be regarded as a
signal proof of the extraordinary strength of his constitution that it
resisted as long as it did.

At last, and of course suddenly, came the final warning of all: the
occurrence, without notice, of an almost agonising home-sickness. The
party travelled by land, as speedily as they could, to the Channel, a
last attack of apoplectic paralysis taking place at Nimegu