time, and was amazed to find, as the conversation went on, that he was sitting next to Macaulay. [Sidenote: 1832--Death of Sir Walter Scott] The year of the Reform Bill was marked by an event forever memorable in the history of literature. That event was the death of Sir Walter Scott. The later years of Scott's life, as we all know, had been darkened by the failure of his publishers, by the money troubles in which that failure had involved him, by the exhausting efforts he had to make to force his wearied mind into redoubled literary exertion, and, more than all, by the loss of the wife who had been his devoted companion for so many years. No words could be more sorrowful and more touching in their simplicity than those in which Scott declared that after his wife's death he never knew what to do with that large share of his thoughts which always, in other {187} days, used to be given to her. He had gone out to Italy, obeying the advice of his friends, in the hope of recovering his health under warmer skies than those of his native land, but the effort was futile. It was of no use his trying to shake off his malady of heart and body by a change of air. He carried his giant about with him, if we may apply to his condition the expressive and melancholy words which Emerson used with a different application. Scott was little over sixty years of age when he died--a time of life at which, according to our ideas of longevity at the present day, we should regard a man as having hardly passed the zenith of his powers and his possibilities. He had added a new chapter to a history of the world's literature. He had opened a new school of romance which soon found brilliant pupils in all countries where romance could charm. There have been many revolutions in literary rulership since his time, but Walter Scott has not been dethroned. {188} CHAPTER LXXIV. THE EMANCIPATION OF LABOR. [Sidenote: 1832--The slave trade]