“During the greater part of the summer and autumn he kept house at Abbotsford like a wealthy country gentleman, receiving with a cordial, yet courtly, hospitality, the many distinguished persons, both from England and the Continent, who found means to obtain an introduction to his enchanted castle. Anything more delightful than a visit to Abbotsford, when Sir Walter was in the full enjoyment of his health and spirits, can scarcely be imagined. After his morning labours, which, even when busiest, were seldom protracted beyond mid-day, (his time for composition being usually from seven to eleven or twelve o’clock,) he devoted himself to the entertainment of his guests with so much unaffected cordiality, such hilarity of spirits, and such homely kindliness of manner, and above all with such an entire absence of literary pretension, that the shyest stranger found himself at once on terms of the easiest familiarity with the most illustrious man in Europe.” In the spring of 1820, Scott was created a baronet by George IV., as a testimony of personal regard; and on the King’s visit to Scotland in 1822, he was appointed to superintend the arrangements for his Majesty’s reception; an office gratifying to his national feelings and antiquarian tastes, as well as to his aristocratical predilections. The profusion of his expenditure no doubt had considerable effect in strengthening the general belief that Scott was the author of the Waverley Novels; inasmuch as he possessed no ostensible means from which the sums expended in the purchase and improvement of Abbotsford, as well as the liberal hospitality which he there exercised, could be defrayed. His urbanity, his innate kindliness of nature, his unassuming demeanour, and readiness to foster humble merit, had almost disarmed ill-will, besides softening the asperity of party feelings; and men looked without envy on a fortune which, to be the produce of one man’s literary labours for the short space of twenty years, seemed almost beyond belief, as well as beyond example, and acknowledged it to be deserved, without a doubt of its continuance, or reality. In this belief, (for otherwise he would have acted differently, being naturally a prudent man,) Scott himself rested secure, until January, 1826, when the house of Constable and Co. became bankrupt, at the close of that calamitous season which pressed so heavily upon all branches of trade. He then, to use his own words, found himself called on to meet the demands of creditors upon commercial establishments with which his fortunes had long been bound up, to the extent of no less a sum than 120,000_l._ How and why he was led into so deep a confidence, and how far the prices received for his works were connected with his commercial transactions, has never, we believe, been clearly explained, nor does it much import the public to know; the error, so far as his reputation is concerned, (and the only