printed, blazoned, and richly bound, and presenting it to the young
lady as a proof of her admirer's abilities, was perhaps hardly very
sagacious. It is quite possible, at least, that Miss Stuart Belches
may have regarded this vehement admirer of spectral wedding journeys
and skeleton bridals, as unlikely to prepare for her that comfortable,
trim, and decorous future which young ladies usually desire. At any
rate, the bold stroke failed. The young lady admired the verses, but,
as we have seen, declined the translator. Perhaps she regarded banking
as safer, if less brilliant work than the most effective description
of skeleton riders. Indeed, Scott at this time--to those who did not
know what was in him, which no one, not even excepting himself,
did--had no very sure prospects of comfort, to say nothing of wealth.
It is curious, too, that his first adventure in literature was thus
connected with his interest in the preternatural, for no man ever
lived whose genius was sounder and healthier, and less disposed to
dwell on the half-and-half lights of a dim and eerie world; yet
ghostly subjects always interested him deeply, and he often touched
them in his stories, more, I think, from the strong artistic contrast
they afforded to his favourite conceptions of life, than from any
other motive. There never was, I fancy, an organization less
susceptible of this order of fears and superstitions than his own.
When a friend jokingly urged him, within a few months of his death,
not to leave Rome on a Friday, as it was a day of bad omen for a
journey, he replied, laughing, "Superstition is very picturesque, and
I make it, at times, stand me in great stead, but I never allow it to
interfere with interest or convenience." Basil Hall reports Scott's
having told him on the last evening of the year 1824, when they were
talking over this subject, that "having once arrived at a country inn,
he was told there was no bed for him. 'No place to lie down at all?'
said he. 'No,' said the people of the house; 'none, except a room in
which there is a corpse lying.' 'Well,' said he, 'did the person die
of any contagious disorder?' 'Oh, no; not at all,' said they. 'Well,
then,' continued he, 'let me have the other bed. So,' said Sir Walter,
'I laid me down, and never had a better night's sleep in my life.'" He
was, indeed, a man of iron nerve, whose truest artistic enjoyment was
in noting the forms of character seen in full daylight by the light of
th