The Journal is a record, in the first place, of indomitable manliness, and of prodigious industry. When it was begun, in November 1825, Scott was at the very height of his enormous prosperity and popularity. He had not advanced far in it, however,—had not, in fact, got through the first month of his entries in it,—when there came upon him the ominous signs of that commercial crash in which he and his fortunes were to be overwhelmed. In several entries, day after day, there are anticipations of this disaster, mixed with still struggling hopes that it might be averted; but by the middle of January 1826 all hope had ceased, and he was a ruined man. “Skene, this is the hand of a beggar,” was his salutation in his room in Castle Street, at seven o’clock in the morning of one of those cold January days, as he held out his hand to the confidential friend whom he had asked to call upon him at that early hour that they might consult over the news. All that he had possessed was swept away; and he was liable for debts, as it turned out, to the amount of about £130,000. It is at this point that one may turn back, if one chooses, to the retrospect of that in Scott’s previous life for which, amid boundless admiration of him otherwise, strict opinion will probably always pronounce him blameworthy. What but his worldly ambition, it is asked, what but his passion for money-making on such a large scale as might enable him to practise lavish social hospitalities, and to found and support a hereditary Scottish lairdship of high rank and name,—what but this had led him to be dissatisfied with his merely literary earnings, and to link the pursuits and pleasures of authorship with the activities and anxieties of a clandestine partnership in hazardous forms of commerce? From one jotting in his Diary it would appear as if, in this matter, even the ruin in which he found himself at last had not taught him real repentance. Quoting a saying of a defunct old Scottish worthy which had been reported to him in these words,—“No chance of opulence is worth the risk of a competence,”—he appends this comment: “It was not the thought of a _great_ man, but perhaps that of a _wise_ one.” Evidently, the ruling passion in Scott had not yet been killed; and, had the hazards of his previous life been still to run, he would have dared them all over again.