old position, he smiled and thanked us, and said, 'Now give me my pen and leave me for a little to myself.' Sophia put the pen into his hand, and he endeavoured to close his fingers upon it, but they refused their office-it dropped upon the paper. He sank back among his pillows-silent tears rolling down his cheeks; but, composing himself, by-and-by motioned to me to wheel him out of doors again. Laidlaw met us at the porch and took his turn at the chair. Sir Walter after a little while again dropt into slumber. When he was awaking Laidlaw said to me, 'Sir Walter has had a little repose.' 'No, Willie,' said he, ‘no repose for Sir Walter but in the grave.' The tears again rushed from his eyes. Friends,' said he, 'don't let me expose myself; get me to bed-that's the only place."" Thus the long tragedy came to an end. A sadder yet more noble tale was never written. There have been hesitations about the continuance of the extraordinary fame which his own generation bestowed upon Scott with such fulness and unanimity as fell to the lot of no other man; but there has been no hesitation about the man and the life thus ended. It may, however, strike the reader, as it does the writer, that there is a certain want both of generosity and justice in the praise sometimes bestowed upon himself at the expense of his work. We may afford to waive that work aside, and give our careless plaudits to the man, celebrating his "health" and "sanity," as the jargon goes, at the expense of his genius, when we find anything worthy to place beside that work, or which can give us half the genial crowd of honest friends, the animated faces, the unforgotten converse, the humour and the wisdom and the noble sentiment, the manly honour and womanly truth, the free and delightful play of fancy which we find in it. Among the agencies that have made Scotland, once so rude and poor, the most prosperous of countries, it is injustice indeed to exclude this one-the warm and tender and living portraiture of her characteristic features, which first made her the acquaintance, the kindly friend and hostess, the admiration of an astonished world. We know no other writer who has done for his country what Sir Walter did for his, unless we seek that writer in a rank above the highest which we dare claim for our beloved romancer and historian-in the larger sphere of Shakspeare, or in the narrow but intensest circle of Dante. We do not claim for him a place beside the poet of England or him of Florence. But being his superiors, they are the only names, which, on their higher level, are his equals in this which he did for his country and for his race. WALTER SCOTT, born 1771; died 1832. Published Translations, Bürger's Lenore, etc., 1796. Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 1802. Lay of the Last Minstrel, 1805. Published The Black Dwarf-Old Mortality, 1816. Tales of the Crusaders (Betrothed and Talisman), 1825. Woodstock, 1826. Chronicles of the Canongate (Two Drovers, Sur- Anne of Geierstein, 1829. Count Robert of Paris-Castle Dangerous, 1831. Life of Napoleon, 1827. Tales of a Grandfather. History of Scotland (Lardner's Encyclopædia). JOHN LEYDEN, born 1775; died 1811. Published Scenes of Infancy, 1802. CHAPTER IV. THOMAS CAMPBELL: AND THE LESSER LIGHTS IN SCOTLAND. THE name of another poet, celebrated in his own immediate days with an admiration which has much failed him now, must be added to the Northern group before we proceed to the somewhat younger band who had risen upon the horizon before Wordsworth had yet gained anything like a due acknowledgment, and while Scott was still in his poetical stage. Thomas Campbell was the son of an Argyllshire family with some pretensions to gentility, which, however, had faded sadly before his day. His father was a merchant whose trade had been ruined by the American war, and it was in a very poor and limited home that the young poet was brought up. He was born in July 1777, and was therefore very near the age of the greater poets, his contemporaries. Very seldom in the history of time has a single decade proved so fruitful in genius as that which began in 1770 with Wordsworth. Campbell began his life with all the promise of excellence which might have ushered in a mu ch greater man. He had, notwithstanding the poverty of his parents, the best education Glasgow could furnish, and distinguished himself much as a scholar. He seems almost to have lisped in numbers, and wrote verses which were very correct, and not without merit, when he was ten years old. He grew up, however, into a somewhat uncertain and shifty youth, having no profession, and a temperament such as has always been called poetical,—a sensitive, irritable, easily-wounded and intensely-feeling nature, which could not exist without emotion. The chief thing known about him in his early days is his susceptibility to friendship. The long and not very interesting biography of him which we owe to Dr. Beattie is principally made up of equally long and scarcely more interesting letters to his young friends, in which the attachment is more apparent than the genius. His first poem was suggested, we are told, by the gentle elegance of the Pleasures of Memory, which he read in the stern island of Mull when languishing there in a tutorship, and cultivating everything that reminded him of scenes more genial. These were still the days when the pleasures of an abstract quality of the mind seemed, to a dutiful intelligence trained in poetical traditions, to be a fine subject for a poem. Campbell had already a reputation as "the Pope" of Glasgow-specially arising from a prize poem entitled an Essay on the Origin of Evil, which was thought to be framed on the model of the Essay on Manwhen he began his great work. It is to be feared that there are comparatively few who think it a great work now; but not only were his own youthful companions penetrated by admiration for it, as was |