The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge had been founded in
the autumn of 1826, and Charles Knight, who had then conceived a plan of
a National Library, was entrusted, in July, 1827, with the
superintendence of its publications. Its first treatises appeared in
sixpenny numbers, once a fortnight. Its "British Almanac" and "Companion
to the Almanac" first appeared at the beginning of 1829. Charles Knight
started also in that year his own "Library of Entertaining Knowledge."
John Murray's "Family Library" was then begun, and in the spring of
1832--the year of the Reform Bill--the advance of civilization by the
diffusion of good literature, through cheap journals as well as cheap
books, was sought by the establishment of "Chambers's Edinburgh Journal"
in the North, and in London of "The Penny Magazine."

In the autumn of that year, 1832, on the 21st of September, Sir Walter
Scott died. The first warning of death had come to him in February,
1830, with a stroke of apoplexy. He had been visited by an old friend
who brought him memoirs of her father, which he had promised to revise
for the press. He seemed for half an hour to be bending over the papers
at his desk, and reading them; then he rose, staggered into the
drawing-room, and fell, remaining speechless until he had been bled.
Dieted for weeks on pulse and water, he so far recovered that to friends
outside his family but little change in him was visible. In that
condition, in the month after his seizure, he was writing these Letters,
and also a fourth series of the "Tales of a Grandfather." The slight
softening of the brain found after death had then begun. But the old
delight in anecdote and skill in story-telling that, at the beginning of
his career, had caused a critic of his "Border Minstrelsy" to say that
it contained the germs of a hundred romances, yet survived. It gave to
Scott's "Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft" what is for us now a