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over to his creditors the large sum of £70,000; a feat unparalleled in the history of literature. But the anxiety and the labor were too much even for his powerful constitution: he died in his heroic attempt.

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HIS MANLY PURPOSE. More for money than for reputation, he compiled hastily, and from partial and incomplete material, a Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, which appeared in 1827. The style is charming and the work eminently readable; but it contains many faults, is by no means unprejudiced, and, as far as pure truth is concerned, is, in parts, almost as much of a romance as any of the Waverley novels; but, for the first two editions, he received the enormous sum of £18,000. The work was accomplished in the space of one year. Among the other task-work books were the two series of The Chronicles of the Canongate (1827 and 1828), the latter of which contains the beautiful story of St. Valentine's Day, or The Fair Maid of Perth. It is written in his finest vein, especially in those chapters which describe the famous Battle of the Clans. In 1829 appeared Anne of Geierstein, another story presenting the figure of Charles of Burgundy, and his defeat and death in the battle with the Swiss at Nancy.

POWERS OVERTASKED. —And now new misfortunes were to come upon him. In 1826 he had lost his wife: his sorrows weighed upon him, and his superhuman exertions were too much for his strength. In 1829 he was seized with a nervous attack, accompanied by hemorrhages of a peculiar kind. In February, 1830, a slight paralysis occurred, from which he speedily recovered; this was soon succeeded by another; and it was manifest that his mind was giving way. His last novel, Count Robert of Paris, was begun in 1830, as one of a fourth series of The Tales of My Landlord: it bears manifest marks of his failing powers, but is of value for the

historic stores which it draws from the Byzantine historians, and especially from the unique work of Anna Comnena: "I almost wish," he said, "I had named it Anna Comnena.” A slight attack of apoplexy in November, 1830, was followed by a severer one in the spring of 1831. Even then he tried to write, and was able to produce Castle Dangerous. With that the powerful pen ended its marvellous work. The manly spirit still chafed that his debts were not paid, and could not be, by the labor of his hands.

FRUITLESS JOURNEY. In order to divert his mind, and, as a last chance for health, a trip to the Mediterranean was projected. The Barham frigate was placed by the government at his disposal; and he wandered with a party of friends to Malta, Naples, Pompeii, Paestum, and Rome. But feeling the end approaching, he exclaimed, "Let us to Abbotsford: " for the final hour he craved the grata quies patriæ; to which an admiring world has added the remainder of the verse — sed et omnis terra sepulchrum. It was not a moment too soon he travelled northward to the Rhine, down that river by boat, and reached London "totally exhausted;" thence, as soon as he could be moved, he was taken to Abbotsford.

RETURN AND DEATH.- There he lingered from July to September, and died peacefully on the 21st of the latter month, surrounded by his family and lulled to repose by the rippling of the Tweed. Among the noted dead of 1832, including Goethe, Cuvier, Crabbe, and Mackintosh, he was the most distinguished; and all Scotland and all the civilized world mourned his loss.

HIS FAME. At Edinburgh a colossal monument has been erected to his memory, within which sits his marble figure.

Numerous other memorial columns are found in other cities,

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but all Scotland is his true monument, every province and town of which he has touched with his magic pen. Indeed, Scotland may be said to owe to him a new existence. In the words of Lord Meadowbank,- who presided at the Theatrical Fund dinner in 1827, and who there made the first public announcement of the authorship of the Waverley novels, Scott was "the mighty magician who rolled back the current of time, and conjured up before our living senses the men and manners of days which have long since passed away. . . It is he who has conferred a new reputation on our national character, and bestowed on Scotland an imperishable name."

Besides his poetry and novels, he wrote very much of a miscellaneous character for the reviews, and edited the works of the poets with valuable introductions and congenial biographies. Most of his fictions are historical in plot and personages; and those which deal with Scottish subjects are enriched by those types of character, those descriptions of manners national and local- and those peculiarities of language, which give them additional and more useful historical value. It has been justly said that, by his masterly handling of historical subjects, he has taught the later historians how to write, how to give vivid and pictorial effects to what was before a detail of chronology or a dry schedule of philosophy. His critical powers may be doubted: he was too kind and genial for a critic; and in reading contemporary authors seems to have endued their inferior works with something of his own fancy.

The Life of Scott, by his son-in-law, J. G. Lockhart, is one of the most complete and interesting biographies in the language. In it the student will find a list of all his works, with the dates of their production; and will wonder that an author who was so rapid and so prolific could write so much that was of the highest excellence. If not the greatest genius of his age, he was its greatest literary benefactor; and it is for this reason that we have given so much space to the record of his life and works.

CHAPTER XXXV..

HE NEW ROMANTIC POETRY: BYRON AND MOORE.

Early Life of Byron,

Childe Harold and Eastern Tales.

Unhappy Marriage.

Philhellenism and Death.

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N immediate succession after Scott comes the name of Byron. They were both great lights of their age; but the former may be compared to a planet revolving in regulated and beneficent beauty through an unclouded sky; while the latter is more like a comet whose lurid light came flashing upon the sight in wild and threatening career.

Like Scott, Byron was a prolific poet; and he owes to Scott the general suggestion and much of the success of his tales in verse. His powers of description were original and great: he adopted the new romantic tone, while in his more studied works he was an imitator and a champion of a former age, and a contemner of his own.

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EARLY LIFE of Byron. The Honorable George Gordon Byron, afterwards Lord Byron, was born in London on the 22d of January, 1788. While he was yet an infant, his father-Captain Byron-a dissipated man, deserted his mother; and she went with her child to live upon a slender pittance at Aberdeen. She was a woman of peculiar disposition, and was unfortunate in the training of her son. alternately petted and quarrelled with him, and taught him to emulate her irregularities of temper. On account of an accident at his birth, he had a malformation in one of his

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feet, which, producing a slight limp in his gait through life, rendered his sensitive nature quite unhappy, the signs of which are to be discerned in his drama, The Deformed Transformed. From the age of five years he went to school at Aberdeen, and very early began to exhibit traits of generosity, manliness, and an imperious nature: he also displayed great quickness in those studies which pleased his fancy.

In 1798, when he was eleven years old, his grand-uncle, William, the fifth Lord Byron, died, and was succeeded in the title and estates by the young Gordon Byron, who was at once removed with his mother to Newstead Abbey. In 1801 he was sent to Harrow, where he was well esteemed by his comrades, but was not considered forward in his studies.

He seems to have been of a susceptible nature, for, while still a boy, he fell in love several times. His third experience in this way was undoubtedly the strongest of his whole life. The lady was Miss Mary Chaworth, who did not return his affection. His last interview with her he has powerfully described in his poem called The Dream. From Harrow he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he lived an idle and self-indulgent life, reading discursively, but not studying. the prescribed course. As early as November, 1806, before he was nineteen, he published his first volume, Poems on Various Occasions, for private distribution, which was soon after enlarged and altered, and presented to the public as Hours of Idleness, a Series of Poems Original and Translated, by George Gordon, Lord Byron, A Minor. These productions, although by no means equal to his later poems, are not without merit, and did not deserve the exceedingly severe criticism they met with from the Edinburgh Review. The critics soon found that they had bearded a young lion in his rage, he sprang out upon the whole literary craft in a satire, imitated from Juvenal, called The English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, in which he ridicules and denounces the very best poets of the day furiously but most uncritically. That his

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