would not believe it, but a grate would be the first of luxuries. Keys, scissors, every thing rusts. * I find the servants civil, and not wanting in intelligence, but industry. Each has servants to wait on him, whom they call sense-boys, i. e., they wait on them to be taught. Scouring is done by the prisoners. Fancy three men employed to clean a room, which, in England, an old woman could do in an hour, while a soldier stands over them with a drawn bayonet."

men.

Such was the last strange, solitary home of L. E. L. ; such the strange life of one who had been before employed only in diffusing her beautiful fancies amid her countryHere she was rising at seven, giving out flour, sugar, etc. from the stores, seeing what room she would have cleaned, and then sitting down to write. In the midst of this new species of existence, she is suddenly plunged into the grave, leaving the wherefore a wonder. The land which was the attraction of her childhood, singularly enough, thus became her sepulcher. A marble slab, with a Latin inscription, is said to be erected there by her husband; and in Brompton Church a monument has been placed by her admiring friends.

MANY and wonderful as are the romances which Sir Walter Scott wrote, there are none of them so wonderful as the romance of his own life. It is not that from a simple son of a Writer to the Signet, he raised himself to wealth and title;—that many have done before him, and far more than that. That many a man of most ordinary brain can achieve; can, as it were, almost stumble into, he knows not how. That many a scrivener, a paviour, or a pawnbroker, has accomplished, and been still deemed no miracle. The city of London, from the days of Dick Whittington to those of Sir Peter Laurie, can show a legion of such culminations. But Sir Walter Scott won his wealth and title in fields more renowned for starvation and "Calamities," than for making of fortunes-those of literature. It was from the barren hills of Parnassus that he drew down wealth in quantities that struck the whole world with astonishment, and made those famous mountains, trodden

bare with the feet of glorious paupers, rivals of the teeming heights of Mexico and Peru. At a period when the sources of literature appeared to have exhausted themselves; when it was declared that nothing original could be again expceted in poetry, that all its secret places were rifled, all its fashions outworn, all its imagery beaten into triteness; when romance was grown mawkish and even childish; when Mrs. Radcliffe and Horace Walpole had exhausted its terrors, and the novelist's path through common life, it was thought, had been gleaned of all possible discovery by Fielding, Richardson and Smollett, Goldsmith and Sterne, -when this was confirmed in public opinion by the sentimentalities of Henry Mackenzie, forth started Scott as a giant of the first magnitude, and demolished all the fond ideas of such dusty-brained dreamers. He opened up on every side new scenes of invention. In poetry and romance, he showed that there was not a corner of these islands which was not, so far from being exhausted, standing thick with the richest materials for the most wonderful and beautiful creations, The reign of the schoolmen and the copyists was at an end. Nature, history, tradition, life, every thing and every place, were shown by this new and vigorous spirit to be full to overflowing with what had been, in the dim eyes of former soi-disant geniuses, only dry bones; but which, at the touch of this bold necromancer, sprung up living forms of the most fascinating grace. The whole public opened eyes of wonder, and in breathless amazement and delight saw this active and unweariable agent call round him, from the brooks and mountains of his native land, troop after troop of kings, queens, warriors, women of regal forms and more regal spirits; visions of purity and loveliness; and lowly creations of no less glorious virtues. The whole land seemed astir with armies, insurrections, pageantries of love, and passages of sorrow, that for twenty years kept the enraptured public in a trance, as it were, of one accumulating marvel and joy. There seemed no bounds

to his powers, or the field of his operations. From Scotland he descended into England, stepped over into France, Germany, Switzerland, nay, even into Palestine and India; and people asked, as volumes, any one of which would have established a first-rate reputation, were poured out, year after year, with the rapid prodigality of a mountain stream,—is there no limit to the wondrous powers of this man's imagination and creative faculty? There really seemed none. Fresh stories, of totally novel construction, fresh characters, of the most startling originality, were con tinually coming forward, as from an inexhaustible world of soul. Not only did the loftiest and most marked characters of our history, either the Scotch or English, again move before us in all their vitality of passions and of crimes, of virtue and of heroism-as Bruce, James V. and VI., Richard Cœur de Lion, Elizabeth, Mary of Scots, Leicester, James I. of England, Montrose, Claverhouse, Cumberland the butcher; not only did the covenanters preach and fight anew, and the highland clans rise in aid of the Stuart, but new personages, of the rarest beauty, the haughtiest command, or the most curious humor, swarmed out upon the stage of life, thick, as if their creation had cost no effort. Flora M'Ivor, Rose Bradwardine, Rebecca, the high-souled Jewess, the unhappy Lucy Ashton and Amy Robsart, the lowly Effie Deans, and her homely yet glorious sister Jenny, the bewitching Di Vernon, and Brenda Troil of the northern isles, stand radiant amid a host of lesser beauties; while Rob Roy, the Robin Hood of the hills, treads in manly dignity his native heather; Balfour of Burley issues a stalwart apparition from his hiding-places; and for infinitude of humor, and strangeness of aspect and mood, where are the pages that can present a troop like these: the Baron of Bradwardine, Dominie Sampson, Meg Merrilies, Monkbarns, Edie Ochiltree, Dugald Dalgetty, Old Mortality, Bailie Nicol Jarvie, Andrew Fairservice, Caleb Balderstone, Flibbertigibbet, Norna of the Fitful Head, VOL. II.-H

and that fine fellow, the farmer of Liddesdale, with whom every one feels a desire to shake hands, honest Dandie Dinmont, with all his Peppers and Mustards yaffling at his heels?

It may be safely said that, in twenty years, one man enriched the literature of his country with more story of intense beauty, and more original character, than all its literati together for two hundred years before. And this is only part of the wonder with Sir Walter Scott; he was all this time a man of business, of grave and various businessa Clerk of Session, sitting in the Parliament-house of Edinburgh daily, during term, from ten to four o'clock-the Sheriff of Selkirk, with its calls-an active cavalry volunteer-a sitter on gas and other committees-a zealous politician and reviewer-mixed up in a world of printing and publishing concerns, and ready to run off and traverse as diligently sea and land, in all directions, at every possible interval. Beside all this, he was a buyer of lands, a planter of extensive woods, a raiser of a fairy castle, a keen sportsman with grayhound and fish-spear. Amid all these avocations and amusements, his writing appeared the produce of his odd hours; and this mass of romance, on which his fame chiefly rests, after all, but a fragment of his literary labor. In the enormous list of his works, to be found at the end of his Life by Lockhart, his novels and poems appear but a slight sprinkling amid his heavier toils: reviews, translations, essays, six volumes; Tales of a Grandfather, twelve volumes; sermons, memoirs, a multitude; editions of Swift and Dryden, in nineteen volumes and eighteen volumes; Somers's Tracts, in thirteen volumes; antiquities, lives, etc., etc. The array of works, written and edited, is astounding: and when we recollect that little of this was done before forty, and that he died at the age of sixty-one, our astonishment becomes boundless. It is in vain to look for another such life of gigantic literary labor, performed by a man of the world, and no exclusive,