In 1864 appeared his first real work, the “Book of Days,” but the success that attended it was dearly bought. He had found it necessary to reside for some years in London, in order to avail himself of the inexhaustible treasures of the British Museum, but on his return to Scotland he was often heard to say “that book is my death-blow.” His nervous system was shattered, and literary labour was at an end. After the completion of seventy volumes, and innumerable articles, compelling almost incessant mental effort for five-and-forty years, the overworked brain at last demanded repose. The descendants of Smollett, the novelist, offered him the use of some hitherto untouched family documents, and he was tempted once more to essay the long-loved task of composition; the volume was printed in 1867, and is said to bear painful marks of the undue strain from which his mind had suffered. The very last years of his life were spent at St. Andrews, where on March 17th, 1871, he died, saying, “Quite comfortable--quite happy--nothing more!” leaving a family of nine children, one of whom, Mr. Robert Chambers, has for some time been a partner in the firm. His second wife (his first had died in 1863) did not survive him. Few men have worked so hard as Robert Chambers; his life, busy in its threefold capacity of author, editor, and publisher, can scarcely have known an unprofitable hour; few men have worked so well, for not a line that he has written, not a book that he has published, but has tended in some way to the education and social improvement of the people; and few men have reaped such an honourable and profitable reward for their labours. Dr. Carruthers, his colleague in the “Cyclopædia of English Literature,” says, “His worldly prosperity kept pace with his acquirements and his labours; he was enabled to practise a liberal hospitality and a generous citizenship; strangers of any mark in literature or science were cordially welcomed, and a forenoon antiquarian ramble with Robert Chambers in the old town of Edinburgh, or a social evening with him in Doune Terrace, were luxuries highly prized and long remembered. Thus we have an instance of a life meritorious, harmonious in all its parts, happy, and benefiting society equally by its direct operation and its example.” The news of Robert Chambers’s death so affected his brother, Mr. David Chambers, who was at that time confined to his home through illness, that it caused the rupture of a blood-vessel in the liver, and three days after this he followed his elder brother; like him he had been an earnest friend of press reform, and had devoted much of his time to promoting the repeal of the fiscal restrictions upon newspapers.