by incurable illness and premature old age, but also by the accumulated
misfortunes of fatal speculations and the heavy responsibility of making
up all with the pen then trembling in his failing hand.

I had been indirectly made known to him by his favorite ward and
_protégée_, the late Lady Northampton, who, accustomed to write to him
monthly, often made mention of me; for I was on terms of friendship with
all her family, an intimacy which in great part arose from the delight
she always had in Keats's poetry, being herself a poetess, and a most
enlightened and liberal critic.

When Sir Walter arrived, he received me like an old and attached friend;
indeed, he involuntarily tried to make me fill up the terrible void
then recently created by the death of Lady Northampton at the age of
thirty-seven years. I went at his request to breakfast with him every
morning, when he invariably commenced talking of his lost friend, of her
beauty, her singularly varied accomplishments, of his growing delight in
watching her from a child in the Island of Mull, and of his making her
so often the model of his most successful female characters, the Lady
of the Lake and Flora MacIvor particularly. Then he would stop short to
lament her unlooked-for death with tears and groans of bitterness such
as I had never before witnessed in any one,--his head sinking down on
his heaving breast. When he revived, (and this agonizing scene took
place every morning,) he implored me to pity him, and not heed his
weakness,--that in his great misfortunes, in all their complications, he
had looked forward to Rome and his dear Lady Northampton as his last and
certain hope of repose; she was to be his comfort in the winding-up of
life's pilgrimage: now, on his arrival, his life and fortune almost
exhausted, she was gone! _gone!_ After these pathetic outpourings, he
would gradually recover his old cheerfulness, his expressive gray eye