No help was accepted. “This right hand shall pay it all,” he said. That eident hand!... Two months later he left Castle Street. “So farewell, poor 39.... _Ha til mi tulidh._”[62] Two months later he went all alone to lodgings, in North St. David Street, and heard next day of Lady Scott’s death at Abbotsford. And so--first there, and then next winter alone with his youngest daughter in a furnished house in Walker Street, and finally at No. 6 Shandwick Place,--Sir Walter Scott worked himself to death in Edinburgh to pay his debts: perhaps more loved and honoured than even in the days of his prosperity. Sir Walter Scott has often been compared to Shakespeare. Be that as it may, in what he has done for Scotland he may even better be compared to Napoleon; for, as Napoleon found France shattered and in chaos, and lifted her to the pinnacle of power, so Scott came at an epoch in Scotland’s history when her “flowers were a’ wede awa’,” and raised her again to her place among the nations. And what he did was accomplished, not by over two hundred battles, but by twenty-nine novels. CHAPTER IX SOCIAL EDINBURGH OF YESTERDAY And the days of auld lang syne. BURNS. Social Edinburgh of yesterday,--that is to say, the social life of Edinburgh from the death of Sir Walter Scott to the death of Queen Victoria,--what does it imply? It means all the life of Edinburgh during those seventy years, all the individual lives lived in Edinburgh, and what each one did towards pushing the world onwards. And what hundreds of names rise in the memory--names of all sorts and conditions of men, “thick as the leaves in Vallombrosa”! It means also the shifting scenery in the background of all those lives--a piling up of noble architecture against the cloudy Scottish sky; a running up of numberless “long unlovely streets”; a constant pulling down of dear, dirty, historic dwellings; an occasional restoration of some ancient building; a widening out of all the suburbs. It means many statues in the streets of those who once were alive in them. It means the intersection of the heart of the beautiful city by gleaming lines of rail, and overhead by gleaming telegraph and telephone wires; it means the light of electricity flashing suddenly through the town, and the old gas-lamps burning dimly, and then put out for the last time; it means railway whistles and cable tramway bells; it means smoke rising from miles and miles of cold grey streets. But it is still the smoke of domestic fires, as in the days when Gavin Douglas, waking on a winter morning in 1512, “bade beit the fire and the candel allicht,” and _not_ the smoke of belching chimneys of commerce. Edinburgh, as befits her intellect, prints and publishes; and, as befits her climate, she brews and distils; and the streams that flow down her valleys towards the Firth of Forth pass on their way many mills that provide paper for printers and authors; but farther than this she declines to go.