Papers, in three volumes, quarto, Miss Seward’s Life and Poetical Works, The Secret History of the Court of James I., in two volumes, Strutt’s Queenhoo Hall, in four volumes, 12mo., and various other single volumes, and began his heavy work on the edition of Swift.  This was the literary work of eight years, during which he had the duties of his Sheriffship, and, after he gave up his practice as a barrister, the duties of his Deputy Clerkship of Session to discharge regularly.  The editing of Dryden alone would have seemed to most men of leisure a pretty full occupation for these eight years, and though I do not know that Scott edited with the anxious care with which that sort of work is often now prepared, that he went into all the arguments for a doubtful reading with the pains that Mr. Dyce spent on the various readings of Shakespeare, or that Mr. Spedding spent on a various reading of Bacon, yet Scott did his work in a steady, workmanlike manner, which satisfied the most fastidious critics of that day, and he was never, I believe, charged with hurrying or scamping it.  His biographies of Swift and Dryden are plain solid pieces of work—­not exactly the works of art which biographies have been made in our day—­not comparable to Carlyle’s studies of Cromwell or Frederick, or, in point of art, even to the life of John Sterling, but still sensible and interesting, sound in judgment, and animated in style.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 24:  Lockhart’s Life of Scott, ii. 268-9.]

CHAPTER VIII.

REMOVAL TO ABBOTSFORD, AND LIFE THERE.

In May, 1812, Scott having now at last obtained the salary of the Clerkship of Session, the work of which he had for more than five years discharged without pay, indulged himself in realizing his favourite dream of buying a “mountain farm” at Abbotsford,—­five miles lower down the Tweed than his cottage at Ashestiel, which was now again claimed by the family of Russell,—­and migrated thither with his household goods.  The children long remembered the leave-taking as one of pure grief, for the villagers were much attached both to Scott and to his wife, who had made herself greatly beloved by her untiring goodness to the sick among her poor neighbours.  But Scott himself describes the migration as a scene in which their neighbours found no small share of amusement.  “Our flitting and removal from Ashestiel baffled all description; we had twenty-five cartloads of the veriest trash in nature, besides dogs, pigs, ponies, poultry, cows, calves, bare-headed wenches, and bare-breeched boys."[25]