and intelligent Mr. Wm. Laidlaw, who acted for him in this capacity in the country, and I think also attended him to town.  I have often been present with Mr. Laidlaw during the short intervals of his labour, and it was deeply affecting to hear the account he gave of his patron’s severe sufferings, and the indomitable spirit which enabled him to overmaster them.  He told me that very often the dictation of Caleb Balderston’s and the old cooper’s best jokes was mingled with groans extorted from him by pains; but that when he, Mr. L., endeavoured to prevail upon him to take a little respite, the only answer he could obtain from Mr. Scott was a request that he would see that the doors were carefully shut, so that the expressions of his agony might not reach his family—­’As to stopping work, Laidlaw,’ he said, ’you know that is wholly out of the question.’  What followed upon these exertions, made in circumstances so very singular, appears to me to exhibit one of the most singular chapters in the history of the human intellect.  The book having been published before Mr. Scott was able to rise from his bed, he assured me that, when it was put into his hands, he did not recollect one single incident, character, or conversation it contained.  He by no means desired me to understand, nor did I understand, that his illness had erased from his memory all or any of the original family facts with which he had been acquainted from the period probably of his boyhood.  These of course remained rooted where they had ever been, or, to speak more explicitly, where explicitness is so entirely important, he remembered the existence of the father and mother, the son and daughter, the rival lovers, the compulsory marriage, and the attack made by his bride upon the unhappy bridegroom, with the general catastrophe of the whole.  All these things he recollected, just as he did before he took to his bed, but the marvel is that he recollected literally nothing else—­not a single character woven by the Romancer—­not one of the many scenes and points of exquisite humour, nor anything with which he was connected as writer of the work.  ’For a long time I felt myself very uneasy,’ he said, ’in the course of my reading, always kept on the qui vive lest I should be startled by something altogether glaring and fantastic; however, I recollected that the printing had been performed by James Ballantyne, who I was sure would not have permitted anything of this sort to pass.’  ‘Well,’ I said, ’upon the whole, how did you like it?’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ’I felt it monstrous gross and grotesque, to be sure, but still the worst of it made me laugh, and I trusted therefore the good-natured public would not be less indulgent.’  I do not think that I ever ventured to lead to this singular subject again.  But you may depend upon it, that what I have said is as distinctly reported as if it had been taken down at the moment in shorthand.  I should not otherwise have imparted the phenomenon at all.”—­Mr. Ballantyne’s MSS.