en; and after
crossing it and reaching London, Sir Walter was taken by sea to the
Forth, and thence home. The actual end was delayed but very little
longer, and it has been told by Lockhart in one of those capital
passages of English literature on which it is folly to attempt to
improve or even to comment, and which, a hundred times quoted, can never
be stale. Sir Walter Scott died at Abbotsford on September 21, 1832, and
was buried four days later at Dryburgh, a post-mortem examination having
disclosed considerable softening of the brain.

There remained unpaid at his death about fifty-five thousand pounds of
the Ballantyne debts, besides private encumbrances on Abbotsford, etc.,
including the ten thousand which Constable had extracted, he knowing,
from Scott unknowing, the extent of the ruin, in the hours just before
it. The falling in of assurances cleared off two-fifths of this balance,
and Cadell discharged the rest on the security of the _Magnum_, which
was equal, though not much more than equal, to the burden in the
longrun. Thus, if Scott's exertions during the last seven years of his
life had benefited his own pocket, his ambition--whether wise or
foolish, persons more confident in their judgment of human wishes than
the present writer must decide--would have been amply fulfilled, and his
son, supposing the money to have been invested with ordinary care and
luck, would have been left a baronet and squire, with at least six or
seven thousand a year. As it was, he did not succeed to much more than
the title, a costly house, and a not very profitable estate, burdened,
though not heavily, with mortgages. This burden was reduced by the good
sense of the managers of the English memorial subscription to Scott, who
devoted the six or seven thousand pounds, remaining after some
embezzlement, to clearing off the encumbrances as far as possible. The
chief result of many Scottish tributes of the same kind was the
well-known Scott Monument on the edge of Princes Street Gardens, which
has the great good luck to be one of the very few not unsatisfactory
things of the kind in the British Islands. By mishap rather than
neglect, no monument in Westminster Abbey was erected for the greater
part of the century; but one has been at last set up in May of the
present year.

FOOTNOTES:

[37] This is a translation, of course; but if anyone will compare
Pitcairn's Latin and Dryden's English, he will see where the poetry
comes in.