ÆT. 47.] SALE OF COPYRIGHTS. 285 "It was an for fourteen months. He might well say, honor directly derived from the service of honor, and neither begged nor bought, as is the usual fashion." The year 1818 ended with something more solid than such honors. His son was about entering life as cavalry-officer, every step in that branch of the military service being very costly. Money was wanted for the completion of Abbotsford on an extended plan. New purchases of land were in view. Therefore he listened to a proposal to sell all his existing copyrights of the poems and novels to Constable the publisher for twelve thousand pounds; the purchaser executing a bond not to disclose the authorship of "Waverley" during his life, under a penalty of two thousand pounds. The purchase-money was paid in bonds; all of which not having been paid off prior to Constable's bankruptcy in 1826, the author of Waverley's interest in all the above copyrights legally reverted to him. CHAPTER XVIII. The Ettrick Shepherd. - Death of Buccleugh. Authorship by Dictation. 1819-1820. COTT was prevented from going to London, in the Easter vacation of 1819, to receive his baronetcy, by a return of the grievous illness which had prostrated him two years before. During the first attack, an incident occurred, very characteristic of the Ettrick Shepherd. Scott was suddenly attacked, while there was an evening-party at his house, at Edinburgh, with a cramp on the right side, which, he wrote to a friend, sent him to bed "roaring like a bull-calf." From this party Hogg and James Ballantyne walked home together; and the latter said, "I don't at all like this illness of Scott's. I have often seen him look jaded of late, and am afraid it is serious." Hogg burst out with, "Haud your tongue, or I'll gar you measure your length on the pavement, you fause, down-hearted loon that you are! Ye daur to speak as if Scott was on his death-bed! It canna be! it must not be! I will not suffer you to speak that gate!" The sentiment was like that of Uncle Toby at the bedside of Le Fèvre; and, as the Shepherd spoke, his voice became suppressed with emotion. ÆT. 48.] FIRST SERIOUS ILLNESS. 287 On his partial recovery on that occasion, Scott was ordered to the country, and put upon what he called starvation-diet; and he had not wholly recovered up to 1819, when the news reached him that his excellent friend, Charles, fourth Duke of Buccleugh, who had gone to Portugal for the benefit of his health, had died at Lisbon, leaving as his successor to titles and estates a boy in his thirteenth year, -the pres ent Duke of Buccleugh and Queensberry. In the last letter to Scott, written when about to embark at Portsmouth, the duke announced that he had begun to build a library at Bowhill, his favorite residence; and had reserved a place for one picture over the chimney-piece, in which warm situation he proposed "to place the guardian of literature," a portrait of Scott, with his dog Maida introduced, to be painted by Raeburn. It was soon after he received this letter, and during the visit of Mr. George Ticknor to Abbotsford, already mentioned, that Scott had the second severe attack, of which he wrote to Southey, "If I had not the strength of a team of horses, I could never have fought through it, and through the heavy fire of medical artillery, scarce less exhausting for bleeding, blistering, calomel, and ipecacuanha have gone on without intermission; while, during the agony of the spasms, laudanum became necessary in the most liberal doses, though inconsistent with the general treatment. I did not lose my senses, because I resolved to keep them; but I thought once or twice they would have gone overboard, top and top-gallant. After a struggle which lasted for a fortnight, he became better; except in point of weakness, well. Mr. Gillies, who saw him ambling on a low Highland pony, sitting slanting on it as if unable to hold himself upright, and with his complexion changed from its usual healthy hue to an olive-brown, almost black, tinge, said he looked nearly as ill as during his last malady in 1831. "The physicians tell me," Scott said to Gillies, "that mere pain cannot kill; but I am very sure that no other man would for over three months encounter the same pain that I have suffered, and live." Under contract to produce a third series of "Tales of My Landlord" by mid-summer, and scarcely able to hold a pen, he was compelled to dictate, a process which Oliver Goldsmith once attempted, and found utterly impracticable. Scott, however, did it, as he reported to Constable, "easily and with comfort." The pen was held for him by John Ballantyne and William Laidlaw; the latter preferred, from his superior rapidity. No matter what his bodily pain, -and it was great, Scott scarcely ever paused, but, after turning himself on his pillow with a groan of torment, usually continued the sentence in the same breath. "But," Mr. Lockhart says, "when a dialogue of peculiar animation was in progress, spirit seemed to triumph altogether over matter: he arose from his couch, and walked up and down the room, raising and lowering his voice, and, as it were, acting the parts. It was in this fashion that Scott produced the far greater portion of The Bride of Lammermoor,' the whole of The Legend of Montrose,' and almost the whole of Ivanhoe.'" One passage in "Ivanhoe," however, and that the finest, being the dialogue in the thirty-ninth chapter, in which the Templar tempts Rebecca, and offers to forsake his Order if she will go with him to Palestine, where, on Mount Carmel, he would pitch the throne which his valor would win for her, and exchange his long-desired bâton for a sceptre, -a fac simile of a single page of this passage, in the close, small writing of Scott, was lithographed. It does not show a single erasure or blot; and, except an occasional full point, punctuation was wholly disregarded. ET. 48.] SLOW RECOVERY. 289 Quotation-marks in the dialogue are accurately inserted; but not a solitary i is dotted. The size of the paper, such as Scott almost invariably used, is eleven by eight and a half inches. The whole, written solid, without a single break, consists of fiftythree lines, each averaging fifteen words, making in all over two and a half of such printed pages as are given in the Household Edition of the Waverley novels. He considered three such pages a good day's work. When he could see visitors, he received Lockhart and John Ballantyne at Abbotsford; read to them the translation of a German ballad ("The Noble Moringer") he had turned into rhyme one day, when he was anxious to know whether his mind had been affected; and, soon after his exertion, had another sharp recurrence of suffering. Lockhart wrote, "I can never forget the groans which, during that space, his agony extorted from him. Well knowing the iron strength of his resolution, to find him confessing its extremity by cries audible not only over the house, but even to a considerable distance from it, it may be supposed that this was sufficiently alarming to me." Next morning he would not hear of either of his guests leaving him, but took them a ride of twenty miles; and the same occurred day after day, Scott merrily telling anecdotes as they went. He was so ill, notwithstanding, that, when Lockhart left Abbotsford, it was with dark fears of its being his last visit. Long before this, James Ballantyne was proprietor and editor of "The Edinburgh Weekly Journal," in which he published at this time the brief character of the Duke of Buccleugh dictated by Scott, and now properly included in his miscellaneous prose works. When the law term began in May, Scott attended in his place in the Court of Session, but was unable to do so regularly; nor did he attempt it for several |