on,
and, more than all, by the loss of the wife who had been his devoted
companion for so many years. No words could be more sorrowful and more
touching in their simplicity than those in which Scott declared that
after his wife's death he never knew what to do with that large share
of his thoughts which always, in other {187} days, used to be given to
her. He had gone out to Italy, obeying the advice of his friends, in
the hope of recovering his health under warmer skies than those of his
native land, but the effort was futile. It was of no use his trying to
shake off his malady of heart and body by a change of air. He carried
his giant about with him, if we may apply to his condition the
expressive and melancholy words which Emerson used with a different
application. Scott was little over sixty years of age when he died--a
time of life at which, according to our ideas of longevity at the
present day, we should regard a man as having hardly passed the zenith
of his powers and his possibilities. He had added a new chapter to a
history of the world's literature. He had opened a new school of
romance which soon found brilliant pupils in all countries where
romance could charm. There have been many revolutions in literary
rulership since his time, but Walter Scott has not been dethroned.

{188}

CHAPTER LXXIV.

THE EMANCIPATION OF LABOR.

[Sidenote: 1832--The slave trade]

The statesmen who had carried the Reform Bill soon found that they had
taken upon themselves a vast responsibility. They had accomplished so
great a triumph that most men assumed them to be capable of any
triumph. It has to be remembered that they had succeeded in
establishing one principle which, up to that time, had never been
recognized, the principle that a constitutional sovereign in these
countries cannot any longer set up his own authority and his own will
in opposition to the advice of his ministers. Up to the days of
William the Fourth, the ministers always had to give way to the
sovereign at the last moment, if the sovereign insisted on maintaining
his dictatorial authority. We have seen how one of the greatest of
English statesmen, the younger Pitt, had bowed his judgment and even
coerced into silence the remonstrances of his own heart and his own
conscience, rather than dispute the authority of an obstinate and a
stupid King. Lord Grey and his colleagues had compelled their King to
listen to reason, and probably not e