The poetical works of Sir Walter Scott, with memoir of the author.

Xxviii MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR.
claims should, so far as regarded him, be still
allowed to subsist; and he pledged himself that the
labour of his future life should be unremittingly
devoted to the discharge of them. He did more
than fulfil' his noble promise; for the gigantic
toil to which, during years after this, he submitted, was the immediate cause that shortened
his life. His self-sacrifice, however, effected
astonishingly much towards the purpose which it
was designed to serve. Between January 1826
and January 1828, he had realized for the creditors the surprising sum of nearly forty thousand
pounds; and soon after his death the principal
of the whole Ballantyne debt was paid up by his
executors.
We have now briefly to describe the efforts by
which this result was accomplished. After spending at Abbotsford, in 1826, a solitary summer,
very unlike its former scenes of splendour, Scott,
returning to town for his winter duties, and compelled to leave behind him his dying wife (who
survived but till the spring), took up his residence
in lodgings, and there continued that system of
incessant and redoubled labour which he had already maintained for months, and maintained
afterwards till it killed him. Woodstock, published in 1826, had been written during the crisis
of his distresses; and the next fruit of his toil
was the Life of Napoleon, which, commenced
before the catastrophe, appeared in 1827, and