MY DEAR HERBERT,--I hope you have got Lockhart's Life of Scott with
you; if not, I will send it out to you. I have been reading it
lately, and I have a strong wish that you should do the same. It
has not all the same value; the earlier part, the account of the
prosperous years, is rather tiresome in places. There is something
boisterous, undignified--even, I could think, vulgar--about the
aims and ambitions depicted. It suggests a prosperous person,
seated at a well-filled table, and consuming his meat with a hearty
appetite. The desire to stand well with prominent persons, to found
a family, to take a place in the county, is a perfectly natural and
wholesome desire; but it is a commonplace ambition. There is a
charm in the simplicity, the geniality, the childlike zest of the
man; but there is nothing great about it. Then comes the crash; and
suddenly, as though a curtain drew up, one is confronted with the
spectacle of an indomitable and unselfish soul, bearing a heavy
burden with magnificent tranquillity, and settling down with
splendid courage to an almost intolerable task. The energy
displayed by our hero in attempting to write off the load of debt
that hung round his neck is superhuman, august. 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