ical latent heat, as fruitful internal warmth of life; a most
robust, healthy man! The truth is, our best definition of Scott were
perhaps even this, that he was, if no great man, then something much
pleasanter to be, a robust, thoroughly healthy, and withal, very
prosperous and victorious man. An eminently well-conditioned man,
healthy in body, healthy in soul; we will call him one of the
_healthiest_ of men. Neither is this a small matter: health is a great
matter, both to the possessor of it and to others....

Scott's career, of writing impromptu novels to buy farms with, was not
of a kind to terminate voluntarily, but to accelerate itself more and
more; and one sees not to what wise goal it could, in any case, have
led him. Bookseller Constable's bankruptcy was not the ruin of Scott;
his ruin was that ambition, and even false ambition, had laid hold of
him; that his way of life was not wise. Whither could it lead? Where
could it stop? New farms there remained ever to be bought, while new
novels could pay for them. More and more success but gave more and
more appetite, more and more audacity. The impromptu writing must have
waxed ever thinner; declined faster and faster into the questionable
category, into the condemnable, into the general condemned.

Already there existed, in secret, everywhere a considerable opposition
party; witnesses of the Waverly miracles, unable to believe in them,
but forced silently to protest against them. Such opposition party was
in the sure case to grow; and even, with the impromptu process ever
going on, ever waxing thinner, to draw the world over to it. Silent
protest must at length come to words; harsh truths, backed by harsher
facts of a world-popularity over-wrought and worn out, behoved to
have been spoken;--such as can be spoken now without reluctance when
they can pain the brave man's heart no more. Who knows? Perhaps it was
better ordered to be all otherwise. Otherwise, at any rate, it was.
One day the Constable mountain, which seemed to stand strongly like
the other rock mountains, gave suddenly, as the icebergs do, a
loud-sounding crack; suddenly with huge clangor, shivered itself into
ice-dust; and sank, carrying much along with it. In one day Scott's
high-heaped money-wages became fairy-money and nonentity; in one day
the rich man and lord of land saw himself penniless, landless, a
bankrupt among creditors.

It was a hard trial. He met it proudly, bravely--like a brave pro