My dear Herbert,—­I hope you have got Lockhart’s Life of Scott with you; if not, I will send it out to you.  I have been reading it lately, and I have a strong wish that you should do the same.  It has not all the same value; the earlier part, the account of the prosperous years, is rather tiresome in places.  There is something boisterous, undignified—­even, I could think, vulgar—­about the aims and ambitions depicted.  It suggests a prosperous person, seated at a well-filled table, and consuming his meat with a hearty appetite.  The desire to stand well with prominent persons, to found a family, to take a place in the county, is a perfectly natural and wholesome desire; but it is a commonplace ambition.  There is a charm in the simplicity, the geniality, the childlike zest of the man; but there is nothing great about it.  Then comes the crash; and suddenly, as though a curtain drew up, one is confronted with the spectacle of an indomitable and unselfish soul, bearing a heavy burden with magnificent tranquillity, and settling down with splendid courage to an almost intolerable task.  The energy displayed by our hero in attempting to write off the load of debt that hung round his neck is superhuman, august.  We see him completing in a single day what would take many writers a week to finish, and doing it day by day, with bereavements, sorrows, ill-health, all closing in upon him.  The quality of the work he thus did matters little; it was done, indeed, at a time of life when under normal circumstances he would probably have laid his pen down.  But the spectacle of the man’s patient energy and divine courage is one that goes straight to the heart.  It is then that one realises that the earlier and more prosperous life has all the value of contrast; one recognises that here was a truly unspoilt nature; and that, if we can dare to look upon life as an educative process, the tragic sorrows that overwhelmed him were not the mere reversal of the wheel of fortune, but gifts from the very hand of the Father—­to purify a noble soul from the dross that was mingled with it; to give a great man the opportunity of living in a way that should furnish an eternal and imperishable example.

I do not believe that in the whole of literature there is a more noble and beautiful document of its kind than the diary of these later years.  The simplicity, the sincerity of the man stand out on every page.  There are no illusions about himself or his work.  He hears that Southey has been speaking of him and his misfortunes with tears, and he says plainly that such tears would be impossible to himself in a parallel case; that his own sympathy has always been practical rather than emotional; his own tendency has been to help rather than to console.  Again, speaking of his own writings, he says that he realises that if there is anything good about his poetry or prose, “It is a hurried frankness of composition, which pleases soldiers, sailors, and young people of bold and active disposition.”  He adds, indeed, a contemptuous touch to the above, which he was great enough to have spared:  “I have been no sigher in shades—­no writer of