servant, to keep him in the carriage.  Mr. Laidlaw was waiting for him, and he met him with a cry, “Ha!  Willie Laidlaw!  O, man, how often I have thought of you!” His dogs came round his chair and began to fawn on him and lick his hands, while Sir Walter smiled or sobbed over them.  The next morning he was wheeled about his garden, and on the following morning was out in this way for a couple of hours; within a day or two he fancied that he could write again, but on taking the pen into his hand, his fingers could not clasp it, and he sank back with tears rolling down his cheek.  Later, when Laidlaw said in his hearing that Sir Walter had had a little repose, he replied, “No, Willie; no repose for Sir Walter but in the grave.”  As the tears rushed from his eyes, his old pride revived.  “Friends,” he said, “don’t let me expose myself—­get me to bed,—­that is the only place.”

After this Sir Walter never left his room.  Occasionally he dropped off into delirium, and the old painful memory,—­that cry of “Burk Sir Walter,”—­might be again heard on his lips.  He lingered, however, till the 21st September,—­more than two months from the day of his reaching home, and a year from the day of Wordsworth’s arrival at Abbotsford before his departure for the Mediterranean, with only one clear interval of consciousness, on Monday, the 17th September.  On that day Mr. Lockhart was called to Sir Walter’s bedside with the news that he had awakened in a state of composure and consciousness, and wished to see him. “‘Lockhart,’ he said, ’I may have but a minute to speak to you.  My dear, be a good man,—­be virtuous,—­be religious,—­be a good man.  Nothing else will give you any comfort when you come to lie here.’  He paused, and I said, ‘Shall I send for Sophia and Anne?’ ‘No,’ said he, ’don’t disturb them.  Poor souls!  I know they were up all night.  God bless you all!’” With this he sank into a very tranquil sleep, and, indeed, he scarcely afterwards gave any sign of consciousness except for an instant on the arrival of his sons.  And so four days afterwards, on the day of the autumnal equinox in 1832, at half-past one in the afternoon, on a glorious autumn day, with every window wide open, and the ripple of the Tweed over its pebbles distinctly audible in his room, he passed away, and “his eldest son kissed and closed his eyes.”  He died a month after completing his sixty-first year.  Nearly seven years earlier, on the 7th December, 1825, he had in his diary taken a survey of his own health in relation to the age reached by his father and other members of his family, and had stated as the result of his considerations, “Square the odds and good night, Sir Walter, about sixty.  I care not if I leave my name unstained and my family property settled. Sat est vixisse.” Thus he lived just a year—­but a year of gradual death—­beyond his own calculation.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 59:  Lockhart’s Life of Scott, ix. 63.]