fortitude and endurance-characteristics which make his gentleness and tenderness all the more striking ; for it is only in a strong man that tenderness is admirable.

One of the finest things in connection with the struggle was the unwillingness of friends and dependents to desert him. Even some of the poor offered what they had. But Scott declined all help; he had resolved to get himself the victory with his "own right hand." His creditors, however, not only positively refused to accept Abbotsford, but they insured its being left to his descendants. "The butler," says Lockhart, "was now doing half the work of the house at probably half his former wages. Old Peter, who had been for five and twenty years a dignified coachman, was now plowman in ordinary. And all, to my view, seemed happier than they had even done before." "If things get round with me," cried Sir Walter one day, "easy shall be Pete's cushion!"

The struggle, however, was too vast and the man too old. In February, 1831, he had a slight stroke of paralysis. Soon a growing weakness of both mind and body forbade further work. Altogether, Sir Walter had written off £40,000 of the debt, but at the end he was led by kind friends to believe that he had accomplished his whole task. As a matter of fact, the sale of his works alone did clear the whole debt, though not till fifteen years after his death. In vain hope of recovery he visited Italy in the winter of 1831-32. But the news of Goethe's death, March 22, 1832, made him eager to get back to his beloved Tweed. He had said to Irving, years before, "If I should not see the heather at least once a year, I think I should die." Returned to Abbotsford, he at first rallied, even thought of renewed

labors; but when the pen dropped from his paralyzed fingers, he sank back among his pillows and wept. "Friends," he said, "don't let me expose myself; get me to bed—that's the only place." After lingering for a few months, he died on the 21st of September, 1832, and was buried in Dryburgh Abbey, the resting-place of his ancestors. A few days before his death he called Lockhart to his bedside. "My dear," he said, “be a good man, be virtuous, be religious, be a good man. Nothing else will give you any comfort when you come to lie here."

Whether Scott's genius falls short of that of his great contemporaries, such as Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, is a matter for literary discussion; but the regularity of his life, instead of being certain disproof, as some ingeniously argue, is possibly the best evidence of great genius. For the perfect man might conceivably be not, only the greatest genius, but also the person most in sympathy with his human surroundings; it is often the incompleteness rather than the greatness of genius which makes it inapt to social routine. Certainly it must be pleasant to all (except perhaps to those who are determined a genius must be eccentric) that Scott was a man without spot or blemish in the eyes of the unromantic world. His life is, indeed, reassuring, a veritable justification of genius, and no doubt a comfort, to boot, to those who would not object to a little genius along with their respectability. The normality of Scott's character, moreover, is doubly significant when it is remembered that he lived in the most wildly romantic period of English literature and that he himself was "the great Romancer." His heart was in an idealized past; his interest was always, as Mr. Chester

ton has pointed out, not in the intricacies of impossible things, but in actual living — when all is said and done, the most romantic thing in the world. It was, indeed, this genuineness, this total absence of all make-believe in Scott, this real romantic spirit, in his life as well as in his work, which found him the first place in the hearts of his friends and readers. It is usually with a glow of generous exaggeration that one applies to a man the fine tribute of Antony to the dead Brutus; but in the case of Scott one is decently within bounds, one feels that even aged moderation would admit "the elements so mixt" in Scott,

"That Nature might stand up

And say to all the world, This was a Man." Mr. Andrew Lang, one of his best biographers, speaks, at the close, of "three generations who have warmed their hands at the hearth of his genius, who have drunk of his enchanted cup, and eaten of his fairy bread, and been happy through his gift."

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

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It is hard for people of to-day, who are used to living with nature and studying it, to understand fully what a completely new message Wordsworth brought to the English-speaking peoples. Until the middle of the eighteenth century there was almost no serious interest in nature, and even then, in such poets as Gray, the new interest was comparatively on the surfacefortable, midsummer pleasure in gently rural things. Burns, in a certain sense as close to nature as any one, nevertheless treated it for the most part as a background. Cowper made indeed a great advance, and to him and Burns Wordsworth owed much. In all the Lake poet's predecessors, however, there was lacking his complete intimacy with nature, his loving interest in it, and especially his religious inspiration from it. Before his day nature had been only a companion, if not quite an impersonal thing; with him it became a prophet. Burns might love the "banks and braes of bonnie Doon," but he could not finish the poem without recalling a love for which "bonnie Doon" was merely a setting. Cowper might love the fair broad valley of the Ouse and the trees about Weston Underwood, but he loved his seclusion more. Wordsworth, in distinction, loved earnestly and simply the mere earth about him for its own sake; for the English Lakes he had the affection of a mediæval mystic for the Church. And to him is chiefly due the interest of the nineteenth century in the

deeper meaning of nature, an interest which we to-day take for granted.

An understanding of this communion of Wordsworth's with nature is, in fact, essential in the briefest account of his life. For the mere facts of his existence

except for one dramatic moment in France - are uninteresting and meaningless without such an introduction. Born in the mountains of Cumberland, he returned thither when he was less than thirty and there lived, in almost uneventful simplicity, the remainder of his life. The reader who thirsts for the exploits of a Ralegh or the elopements of a Shelley finds little enough in Wordsworth. Yet this extremely simple life, when his communion with nature is understood, becomes one of the most interesting; those who really care for Wordsworth love him.

Few men, indeed, demand of the reader more initiation than Wordsworth does. No better method can be found than acquiring an intimacy with that part of England which meant so much to him; a fact especially borne out by those who have visited the Lakes not via motorbus vociferous, but on foot into the inmost recesses that he loved-down the valley of the Duddon, along the banks of Esthwaite Water, or up the Langdale Valley to Blea Tarn. Among the mountains and lakes of this region, one catches at last glimpses of the man's true personality. But always it is necessary to "Bring with you a heart

That watches and receives."

There is at first sight nothing very grand about the scenery of the Lake District, the whole of which covers an area of scarcely thirty miles square. The mountains are in fact very small. But so close together do they