writer, the panegyrist of great folk and genteel people; became insolvent because, though an author, he deemed it ungenteel to be mixed up with the business part of the authorship; died paralytic and broken-hearted because he could no longer give entertainments to great folks, leaving behind him, amongst other children, who were never heard of, a son, who, through his father's interest, had become lieutenant-colonel in a genteel cavalry regiment. A son who was ashamed of his father because his father was an author; a son who--paugh--why ask which was the best blood? So, owing to his rage for gentility, Scott must needs become the apologist of the Stuarts and their party; but God made this man pay dearly for taking the part of the wicked against the good; for lauding up to the skies the miscreants and robbers, and calumniating the noble spirits of Britain, the salt of England, and his own country. As God had driven the Stuarts from their throne, and their followers from their estates, making them vagabonds and beggars on the face of the earth, taking from them all that they cared for, so did that same God, who knows perfectly well how and where to strike, deprive the apologist of that wretched crew of all that rendered life pleasant in his eyes, the lack of which paralysed him in body and mind, rendered him pitiable to others, loathsome to himself,--so much so, that he once said, "Where is the beggar who would change places with me, notwithstanding all my fame?" Ah! God knows perfectly well how to strike. He permitted him to retain all his literary fame to the very last--his literary fame for which he cared nothing; but what became of the sweetness of life, his fine house, his grand company, and his entertainments? The grand house ceased to be his; he was only permitted to live in it on sufferance, and whatever grandeur it might still retain, it soon became as desolate a looking house as any misanthrope could wish to see--where were the grand entertainments and the grand company? there are no grand entertainments where there is no money; no lords and ladies where there are no entertainments--and there lay the poor lodger in the desolate house, groaning on a bed no longer his, smitten by the hand of God in the part where he was most vulnerable. Of what use telling such a man to take comfort, for he had written the "Minstrel" and "Rob Roy,"--telling him to think of his literary fame? Literary fame, indeed! he wanted back his lost gentility:-- "Retain my altar, I care nothing for it--but, oh! touch not my _beard_." PORNY'S _War of the Gods_.