agreeable exhibition to a close. On the whole, I would rather not
have witnessed it. It is a satisfactory idea, however, that the
last forty years of the peasant poet's life have been passed in
competence and perfect comfort. Having been cured of his bardic
improvidence for many a day past, and grown as attentive to the main
chance as a canny Scotsman should be, he is now considered to he
quite well off as to pecuniary circumstances. This, I suppose, is
worth having lived so long for.

I took occasion to inquire of some of the countrymen of Burns in
regard to the health of Sir Walter Scott. His condition, I am sorry
to say, remains the same as for ten years past; it is that of a
hopeless paralytic, palsied not more in body than in those nobler
attributes of which the body is the instrument. And thus he
vegetates from day to day and from year to year at that splendid
fantasy of Abbotsford, which grew out of his brain, and became a
symbol of the great romancer's tastes, feelings, studies,
prejudices, and modes of intellect. Whether in verse, prose, or
architecture, he could achieve but one thing, although that one in
infinite variety. There he reclines, on a couch in his library, and
is said to spend whole hours of every day in dictating tales to an
amanuensis,--to an imaginary amanuensis; for it is not deemed worth
any one's trouble now to take down what flows from that once
brilliant fancy, every image of which was formerly worth gold and
capable of being coined. Yet Cunningham, who has lately seen him,
assures me that there is now and then a touch of the genius,--a
striking combination of incident, or a picturesque trait of
character, such as no other man alive could have bit off,--a glimmer
from that ruined mind, as if the sun had suddenly flashed on a half-
rusted helmet in the gloom of an ancient ball. But the plots of