other words, Scott acted just as he had made Waverley and others of his heroes act, on a code of honour which he knew to be false, and he must have felt in this case to be something worse.  He thought himself at that time under the most stringent obligations both to his creditors and his children, to do all in his power to redeem himself and his estate from debt.  Nay, more, he held that his life was a trust from his Creator, which he had no right to throw away merely because a man whom he had not really injured, was indulging a strong wish to injure him; but he could so little brook the imputation of physical cowardice, that he was moral coward enough to resolve to meet General Gourgaud, if General Gourgaud lusted after a shot at him.  Nor is there any trace preserved of so much as a moral scruple in his own mind on the subject, and this though there are clear traces in his other writings as to what he thought Christian morality required.  But the Border chivalry was so strong in Scott that, on subjects of this kind at least, his morality was the conventional morality of a day rapidly passing away.

He showed the same conventional feeling in his severity towards one of his own brothers who had been guilty of cowardice.  Daniel Scott was the black sheep of the family.  He got into difficulties in business, formed a bad connexion with an artful woman, and was sent to try his fortunes in the West Indies.  There he was employed in some service against a body of refractory negroes—­we do not know its exact nature—­and apparently showed the white feather.  Mr. Lockhart says that “he returned to Scotland a dishonoured man; and though he found shelter and compassion from his mother, his brother would never see him again.  Nay, when, soon after, his health, shattered by dissolute indulgence, ... gave way altogether, and he died, as yet a young man, the poet refused either to attend his funeral or to wear mourning for him, like the rest of his family."[36] Indeed he always spoke of him as his “relative,” not as his brother.  Here again Scott’s severity was due to his brother’s failure as a “man of honour,” i. e. in courage.  He was forbearing enough with vices of a different kind; made John Ballantyne’s dissipation the object rather of his jokes than of his indignation; and not only mourned for him, but really grieved for him when he died.  It is only fair to say, however, that for this conventional scorn of a weakness rather than a sin, Scott sorrowed sincerely later in life, and that in sketching the physical cowardice of Connochar in The Fair Maid of Perth, he deliberately made an attempt to atone for this hardness towards his brother by showing how frequently the foundation of cowardice may be laid in perfectly involuntary physical temperament, and pointing out with what noble elements of disposition it may be combined.  But till reflection on many forms of human character had enlarged Scott’s charity, and perhaps also the range of his speculative ethics, he remained a conventional