More satisfactory it is to leave that retrospective question, and to read the story which the journal tells of his unparalleled exertions to right himself with the world, and with his own sense of honour, to the last farthing of his huge responsibilities. For a while, indeed,—the new shock of his wife’s death having come upon him in the very midst of the first troubles of his ruined condition, and his ability to sustain the load of his distresses being at the same time impaired by serious ill-health and frequent and intense bodily pains,—it is as if the downfall had been complete. Gloom seems to have settled on his spirits; and, though he bears a brave face to the world, we see him, in hours when he was alone, depressed secretly by crowding recollections of his happy past in comparison with the woeful present, and sunk sometimes in mere sobbings and tears. Gradually, however, he rouses himself; and what is it that we see then? Either still at Abbotsford, when his official duties in the Court of Session will allow him to leave town (for, by a family-prearrangement, he had still a life-rent tenure of Abbotsford, and could sequester himself there, when he chose, on a greatly reduced establishment), or else in one or other of those Edinburgh residences to which he removed after his house in Castle Street had been sold,—first, lodgings in North St. David Street, then a furnished house in Walker Street, and finally a house in Shandwick Place,—we see the widowed veteran struggling on in the vast enterprise to which he had set himself of the discharge ultimately of all his debts, dashing cares aside as well as he could, and, though liable still to solitary hours of melancholy and to interrupting worries with lawyers and creditors, yet always pen in hand, and working, working, working. Extend the view over the six years from 1826 to 1831, and what a prolonged labour of Hercules! The voluminous _Life of Napoleon Bonaparte_; the novel of _Woodstock_; the double series of “The Chronicles of the Canongate,” including _The Two Drovers_, _The Highland Widow_, _The Surgeons Daughter_, and _The Fair Maid of Perth_; the separate extra novels of _Anne of Geierstein_, _Count Robert of Paris_, and _Castle Dangerous_; the quadruple series of _The Tales of a Grandfather_, with a collateral _History of Scotland_; the _Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft_; the completion and publication of the verse-dramas called _The Doom of Devorgoil_ and _The Ayrshire Tragedy_; a collective edition of the Miscellaneous Prose Works; the commencement of the author’s _magnum opus_, as it was termed, in the shape of the revised and annotated reissue of the whole of the Waverley Novels: these, together with a number of more casual performances, such as the Malachi Malagrowther Letters and contributions to Reviews, formed the astonishing total of Scott’s literary achievements during those six years, in addition to the previous total at which the world had already wondered.