[Footnote 1517: Captain Basil Hall records the following conversation with Scott:-"It occurs to me," I observed, "that people are apt to make too much fuss about the loss of fortune, which is one of the smallest of the great evils of life, and ought to be among the most tolerable."--"Do you call it a small misfortune to be ruined in money-matters?" he asked. "It is not so painful, at all events, as the loss of friends."--"I grant that," he said. "As the loss of character?"--"True again." "As the loss of health?"--"Ay, there you have me," he muttered to himself, in a tone so melancholy that I wished I had not spoken. "What is the loss of fortune to the loss of peace of mind?" I continued. "In short," said he, playfully, "you will make it out that there is no harm in a man's being plunged over-head-and-ears in a debt he cannot remove." "Much depends, I think, on how it was incurred, and what efforts are made to redeem it--at least, if the sufferer be a rightminded man." "I hope it does," he said, cheerfully and firmly.--FRAGMENTS OF VOYAGES AND TRAVELS, 3rd series, pp. 308-9.] [Footnote 1518: "These battles," he wrote in his Diary, "have been the death of many a man, I think they will be mine."] [Footnote 1519: Scott's Diary, December 17th, 1827.] [Footnote 161: From Lovelace's lines to Lucusta [16Lucy Sacheverell], 'Going to the Wars.'] [Footnote 162: Amongst other great men of genius, Ariosto and Michael Angelo devoted to her their service and their muse.] [Footnote 163: See the Rev. F. W. Farrar's admirable book, entitled 'Seekers after God' [16Sunday Library]. The author there says: "Epictetus was not a Christian. He has only once alluded to the Christians in his works, and then it is under the opprobrious title of 'Galileans,' who practised a kind of insensibility in painful circumstances, and an indifference to worldly interests, which Epictetus unjustly sets down to 'mere habit.' Unhappily, it was not granted to these heathen philosophers in any true sense to know what Christianity was. They thought that it was an attempt to imitate the results of philosophy, without having passed through the necessary discipline. They viewed it with suspicion, they treated it with injustice. And yet in Christianity, and in Christianity alone, they would have found an ideal which would have surpassed their loftiest anticipations."] [Footnote 164: Sparks' 'Life of Washington,' pp. 141-2.] [Footnote 165: Wellington, like Washington, had to pay the penalty of his adherence to the cause he thought right, in his loss of "popularity." He was mobbed in the streets of London, and had his windows smashed by the mob, while his wife lay dead in the house. Sir Walter Scott also was hooted and pelted at Hawick by "the people," amidst cries of "Burke Sir Walter!"] [Footnote 166: Robertson's 'Life and Letters,' ii. 157.]