They conveyed him back by slow stages, seeing this and that continental sight on his homeward-route, but hardly knowing what he saw. He was in London again for a week or two in June and July 1832, attended medically in a hotel in Jermyn Street. Brought thence by sea to Edinburgh, he passed a night, a day, and another night, in a hotel in St. Andrew Square, in a state of utter unconsciousness; and on the 11th of July they took him to Abbotsford. On their way thither through the old familiar scenery he began to recognise places and objects, and to mutter their names,—Gala Water, Buckholm, Torwoodlee; and, when they approached Abbotsford itself, and he caught sight of its towers, he sprang up in such a state of excitement that they could hardly hold him in the carriage. “Ha! Willie Laidlaw! O man, I have often thought of _you_,” were his first words, after his old friend and amanuensis Laidlaw, who was waiting in the porch, had assisted the rest in carrying him into the house, and seating him in a chair in the dining-room. The return of consciousness which this recognition signified became more and more marked, at least at intervals, in the two months and ten days through which he still lingered. He talked with those of his family who were about him, could be shifted from room to room or even wheeled in a Bath chair through parts of his grounds, and could listen to readings and seem to take an interest in them. Once he insisted on being placed at his writing-table, with paper, pens, and ink before him in the accustomed order, and wanted to be left to himself; but, when the pen had been put into his hand and his fingers refused to hold it, tears trickled down his cheeks, and he gave up the attempt. There were, as often in such cases of brain-paralysis, some days of almost frantic vehemence, when it was painful to be near him; but these were succeeded by a feeble quietude and a gradual ebbing-away of life. On the 21st of September 1832, with the ripple of the Tweed heard by those who stood round his bed, Sir Walter Scott, then only in the sixty-second year of his age, breathed his last. In the Diary itself the narrative of those closing years of Scott’s life is broken short at the point where they were bringing him back from Italy as a dying invalid. The last few months are a total blank in the Diary; where, indeed, the entries for the later years of the included seven are scantier and more intermittent than those for the earlier. But it is not solely as an exact autobiographic record of the incidents of so many memorable years of a memorable life that the Diary is now of interest. Implicated in that main interest, and catching the attention of the reader again and again as he advances through the pages, are certain recurring particular informations as to Scott’s character and ways which possess an independent interest, and may be reverted to separately.