ging his duties as clerk of
session as usual, and received in the afternoon a visit from a lady
friend of his, Miss Young, who was submitting to him some manuscript
memoirs of her father, when the stroke came. It was but slight. He
struggled against it with his usual iron power of will, and actually
managed to stagger out of the room where the lady was sitting with
him, into the drawing-room where his daughter was, but there he fell
his full length on the floor. He was cupped, and fully recovered his
speech during the course of the day, but Mr. Lockhart thinks that
never, after this attack, did his style recover its full lucidity and
terseness. A cloudiness in words and a cloudiness of arrangement began
to be visible. In the course of the year he retired from his duties of
clerk of session, and his publishers hoped that, by engaging him on
the new and complete edition of his works, they might detach him from
the attempt at imaginative creation for which he was now so much less
fit. But Sir Walter's will survived his judgment. When, in the
previous year, Ballantyne had been disabled from attending to business
by his wife's illness (which ended in her death), Scott had written in
his diary, "It is his (Ballantyne's) nature to indulge apprehensions
of the worst which incapacitate him for labour. I cannot help
regarding this amiable weakness of the mind with something too nearly
allied to contempt," and assuredly he was guilty of no such weakness
himself. Not only did he row much harder against the stream of fortune
than he had ever rowed with it, but, what required still more
resolution, he fought on against the growing conviction that his
imagination would not kindle, as it used to do, to its old heat.

When he dictated to Laidlaw,--for at this time he could hardly write
himself for rheumatism in the hand,--he would frequently pause and
look round him, like a man "mocked with shadows." Then he bestirred
himself with a great effort, rallied his force, and the style again
flowed clear and bright, but not for long. The clouds would gather
again, and the mental blank recur. This soon became visible to his
publishers, who wrote discouragingly of the new novel--to Scott's own
great distress and irritation. The oddest feature in the matter was
that his letters to them were full of the old terseness, and force,
and caustic turns. On business he was as clear and keen as in his best
days. It was only at his highest task, the task o