We see him
completing in a single day what would take many writers a week to
finish, and doing it day by day, with bereavements, sorrows,
ill-health, all closing in upon him. The quality of the work he thus
did matters little; it was done, indeed, at a time of life when under
normal circumstances he would probably have laid his pen down. But the
spectacle of the man's patient energy and divine courage is one that
goes straight to the heart. It is then that one realises that the
earlier and more prosperous life has all the value of contrast; one
recognises that here was a truly unspoilt nature; and that, if we can
dare to look upon life as an educative process, the tragic sorrows that
overwhelmed him were not the mere reversal of the wheel of fortune, but
gifts from the very hand of the Father--to purify a noble soul from the
dross that was mingled with it; to give a great man the opportunity of
living in a way that should furnish an eternal and imperishable example.

I do not believe that in the whole of literature there is a more noble
and beautiful document of its kind than the diary of these later years.
The simplicity, the sincerity of the man stand out on every page. There
are no illusions about himself or his work. He hears that Southey has
been speaking of him and his misfortunes with tears, and he says
plainly that such tears would be impossible to himself in a parallel
case; that his own sympathy has always been practical rather than
emotional; his own tendency has been to help rather than to console.
Again, speaking of his own writings, he says that he realises that if
there is anything good about his poetry or prose, "It is a hurried
frankness of composition, which pleases soldiers, sailors, and young
people of bold and active disposition." He adds, indeed, a contemptuous
touch to the above, which he was great enough to have spared: "I have
been no sigher in shades--no writer of

Songs and sonnets and rustical roundelays
Framed on fancies and whistled on reeds."

A few days later, speaking of Thomas Campbell, the poet, he says that
"he has suffered by being too careful a corrector of his work."

That is a little ungenerous, a little complacent; noble and large as
Scott's own unconsidered writings are, he ought to have been aware that
methods differ. What, for instance, could be more extraordinary than
the contrast between Scott and Wordsworth--Scott with his "You know I
don't care a curse abou