was a momentary confusion, and then Gilchrist, who seemed rather sobered than excited by what had happened, said quietly, "I have stated my judgment of that fellow in the only fitting way. You may take the matter before the committee, and I shan't defend myself. I am not anxious to belong to any association which has Mr. Fraser amongst its members." He put on his hat and walked from the room. Confused discussion and surmise followed his departure, and everybody was asking for a history of the quarrel. "He insulted me vilely in my own rooms some days ago," said my substitute, "and heaped such accusations on me that I thought the man was mad. I sent a letter after him, telling him how impossible it was that I should turn my back upon him because he had lost his money, for that was the gist of his main charge. He neglected my letter for two days, then came to me to offer his apologies, and I declare that I have not seen him since until I found him here." It is not often that a man can be rejoiced to see his own person assailed, but I experienced that rare pleasure, and was hugely delighted by it. My only regret was that Gilchrist had not taken a stout walking-stick, and administered a genuine, instead of a merely formal chastisement. I had at least the satisfaction of making life as comfortless to the worldly wise one as he made it to me, and I never ceased to upbraid him and to triumph over his miseries of that evening. I went home with him, and all night long I made him toss upon his pillow. I could not be quite sure whether he had more power to quit the tenement he usurped than I had to chase him from it. But if I had known for a fact that he might have made over my property to me at any moment, I could not have done more to plague him from his stronghold. The promised proofs came next day, and were read, corrected, and returned, in spite of my passionate remonstrances. Next morning the journal was circulated over London, and the theft of the professor's discovery was a fact accomplished and beyond recall. "The professor," I told my imitation, "will have that journal on his breakfasttable. His niece will read the list of contents to him, as she does always, and finding my name amongst the list of contributors he will have the article read aloud to him. He will recognize the theft at once, and you, you brute, insensate, blind, and selfish as you are, will have stabbed one of the best hearts in the world with your ingratitude, and made a pitying, scornful enemy of your staunchest and most helpful friend. This is where your gospel of worldly wisdom leads you. There is no wisdom outside honor, and your poor selfishnesses are as stupid as they are base." "A man can travel on no road in life without encountering obstacles, and I know well enough who meets the greater, and who the less. I shall thrive where you would have failed. I shall be famous in a month." as long "And infamous," I answered, 66 as you are remembered." It was as hopeless an enterprise to try to shake his creed as it was on his side to strive to break down mine. He sat down to his work in a dogged silence, and in a little while there was heard the rumble of carriage wheels in the street. I knew by an intuition who was coming, and if any other figure than that of the professor had entered the room I should have been surprised. The noble old face was pale and troubled. 66 James," he said, "I can hardly think this anything but an accident. Some of the papers I gave you the other day must have got mixed with yours. Tell me how this last column found its way into this article." The rascal took the exposure with consummate impudence. "Let me offer you a seat, sir," he said, in a voice of courtesy and self-possession. "Will you kindly show me what you mean? 'James," said the professor, "from the line marked here until the end, this work is mine. I think I fear-that the phraseology is slightly altered. Tell me how my thought, my discovery, my words, come to find a place in an article which bears your name." "My dear professor," the villain answered, "I do not understand you. There is not a word or a line here of which I am not honestly the author." "You have read the article since it appeared in print?" the professor demanded. "I read every line of it at breakfast." "And you declare it to be the result of your own unaided investigation?" "I declare it to be the result of my own unaided investigation. Undoubtedly. Every word and line." "I am very sorry, James," said the good old man, rather tremulously. "I had thought well of you. I can really say no | the dentist's. The decorous Wells held a more. I am deeply, deeply sorry." handkerchief to his nose, and consulted it now and again with a doubtful and displeased aspect. I was struggling with the doctor, who was in the act of thrusting me back into the operating chair. "You're a lively patient, Fraser. Come, are you all right now? I made some confused response, and the doctor held up before me a tooth in a pair of forceps. There," he said, "is the enemy. He'll trouble you no more. Would you like to take him home with you?" "I beg your pardon, sir," cried the pretender, intercepting him as he made towards the door, "but we must not part in this way. You impeach my honor. From another man I should resent, and resent bitterly, the accusation you hint at. But when a charge of that sort comes from you, sir, I have nothing but pain and wonder to set against it." The old man shook his head with infinite mournfulness. "There shall be no exposure," he said. "No scandal. For your father's sake I would not breathe a word. But let me go. I can serve no purpose by staying bere. I hope that you may never live to be wounded in this way." "Oh, sir!" cried the other, with a swaggering air of honor, "I cannot content myself that such an imputation should be buried." He stood there at the door with an unabashable front of brass, and an air of bullying rectitude so exasperating that such a tide of passion surged through me as I had never known. I met his eye, point-blank, and saw him wince and quail. Ì bent, or seemed to bend the whole forces of my nature upon him, and suddenly I saw in his face the change which I had seen before. It paled, and then grew grey and filmy. I was conscious once more of something like a bodily sensation. I would not, I dared not, release his eye, but I felt that I was once more endowed with limbs and motion. I dashed upon him, struggled with him, bore him down. We seemed to be of equal strength, and we both fought as men fight for life, but I knew that I was gaining. I had my knee upon his chest, my hands about his throat. Throughout the struggle there had been a nightmare feeling of feebleness in motion, madly as we both had fought; but now my forces seemed all at once to revive. I squeezed him hard, and he dwindled, dwindled, dwindled, until all in a moment he was gone. The professor laid both hands on my shoulder and shook me with a force surprising in so old a man. A voice which was certainly not the professor's called out in a rallying tone which had to my fancy a spice of exasperation in it. "Come, come, old man! Wake up! Wake up! That's enough, in Heaven's 66 "No!" I answered. "I have had enough of him, and more than enough, if you knew all." From Temple Bar. THE JOURNAL OF SIR WALTER SCOTT. ALL the readers of Lockhart's admirable "Life of Scott" have had their interest in the narrative deepened when, towards the close of 1825, extracts are given from the journal which Sir Walter then began to keep. He made the first entry on the 20th of November, and it opened with these words, the significant ones in italics, which occur in the manuscript, having been omitted by Lockhart: I have all my life regretted that I did not keep a regular journal. I have myself lost recollection of much that was interesting, and I have deprived my family and the public of some curious information, by not carrying this resolution into effect. I have bethought me, on seeing lately some volumes of Byron's notes, that he probably had hit upon the right way of keeping such a memorandum-book, by throwing aside all pretence to regularity and order, and marking down events just as they occurred to recollection. I will try this plan; and behold I have a handsome locked volume, such as might serve for a lady's album. This volume, which was bound in vellum, and provided with a good lock, was entirely filled, and a second like unto it was half filled by Sir Walter with entries made almost without intermission till April, 1832, being five months before his death. Indeed, the last words that Sir Walter penned were written in the second volume of his journal. The two volumes were carefully preserved at Abbotsford after Lockhart had made extracts from them. The extracts which he printed in the "Life" do not represent half the contents of the journal, nor are the extracts always given in the very words of Sir Walter. While Lockhart did right in using his discretion, and refraining from publishing what might be distasteful to | some details chiefly of family and domestic persons who were living when he wrote, he did wrong in unnecessarily altering the text, and making omissions such as that of which an example is given in the passage quoted above. Before giving addi. tional examples of this injudicious editing, let me state how the journal came to be made public. interest being omitted. Not only is the reprint accurate, but the many quotations are verified, while footnotes abound containing illustrative extracts from unpublished letters of Scott, and from unpublished reminiscences of his friends Ballantyne and Skene. While nearly half of Sir Walter's jourIt is now sixty-eight years since Sir nal is now printed for the first time, a Walter Scott was laid beside his wife in large number of the passages which have the grave of his ancestors in Dryburgh already appeared bear a different complexAbbey. All those who might be affected ion in the present version. Lockhart left by anything in his journal have gone down out and altered sentences, and he transto their graves also, while the desire to posed the arrangement of paragraphs. learn as much as possible about the Moreover, he interspersed letters and greatest and most popular writer of this comments, whereas the journal in its prescentury has not abated. His works sold ent form runs on continuously. A few by tens of thousands during his lifetime; examples will show the nature and context have been sold by the million since his of the liberties which Lockhart took with death, and though some lady novelists the text. On the 21st of November Sir have pronounced them antiquated, and a Walter wrote that he attended a meeting famous one foolishly thought to improve of the Oil Gas Committee, of which he them by abridgment, they still continue to was chairman, and adds: "It has amused delight the schoolboy who reads them for me much by bringing me into company the story, and the intelligent man or woman with a body of active, business-loving, who reads them for their graphic pictures money-making citizens of Edinburgh, of bygone days, and of nature and human chiefly Whigs by the way, whose sentinature under varied aspects. Sir Walter ments and proceedings amuse me. used to say that he should die if he did Lockhart's version is: "This brings me not see the heather once a year. Reading into company with a body of active busihis novels produces a mental exhilaration ness beings, money-making citizens of which is almost equivalent to the physical Edinburgh-chiefly Whigs, by the way pleasure of gazing upon and tramping through the heather on a Scottish moor. There is, then, a large class to which everything connected with him has a special interest, and few things from his pen can have a greater attraction to the members of it than a record of what he did and thought. His journal is such a record, and though the period which it covers is not the happiest in his career, yet the picture of his mind during it has a charm, and is fraught with an amount of instruction which cannot be over-estimated. The Honorable Mrs. Maxwell-Scott, to whom Abbotsford and all that once was Scott's now belongs, rightly inferred that the time had arrived for giving the journal to the public in the form that it was written. Three years ago she placed the precious volumes in the competent hands of Mr. David Douglas, who has lovingly edited and published them, the house in which they are published being that which Scott first occupied in Edinburgh after his marriage at Carlisle with Margaret Charlotte Carpenter, on the 24th of December, 1797. Mr. Douglas states in the preface that the journal appears now as Scott left it, obvious slips of the pen being corrected, and whose sentiments and proceedings amuse me." The change is not great, yet there was no occasion for any, nor do I think that Lockhart's " "body of active business beings" any improvement on Scott's "body of active, business-loving, money-making citizens." When rumors of a financial catastrophe were current, Scott wrote, "Thank God, I have enough at least to pay forty shillings in the pound." Though not literally accurate, this expressed his feelings of solvency, and there was no need for altering the forty to twenty. He wrote, "I cannot help thinking," which Lockhart changed into "I cannot help owning," "thinking " being quite correct in the circumstances. After complaining of palpitation of the heart, he adds, that the mind is then "apt to receive and encourage gloomy apprehensions and causeless fears." Lockhart has struck out the three last words. "Hogg came to breakfast this morning, having taken and brought for his companion the Galashiels bard, David Thomson." The words in italics do not appear in Lockhart's version. When Sir Walter's affairs were giving him concern, and the news he received was unsatisfactory, he wrote: " Annoyed with anxious presentiments, which the night's post must dispel or confirm all in London as bad as possible." Lockhart omitted the words in italics. Scott wrote: "How willing the vulgar are to gull themselves," and Lockhart substituted "public" for vulgar. As the gloom deepened, he wrote: " Things are so much worse with Constable than I apprehended that I shall neither save Abbotsford nor anything else. Naked we entered the world, and naked we leave it - blessed be the name of the Lord." By suppressing the words in italics, Lockhart spoilt this passage, and did so without any apparent reason. went to Ashestiel in the sociable, with Colonel Ferguson." By omitting "in the sociable," Lockhart leaves a doubt whether Sir Walter went on foot, on horseback, or in a carriage, and I cannot understand why he should have objected to the words standing and conveying a piece of information. When Sir Walter wrote, "Got up late in the morning, past eight," Lockhart struck out the words in italics. After his wife's death Sir Walter wrote one day: "Bad dreams about poor Charlotte. Woke, thinking my old and inseparable friend beside me.' Lockhart spoilt the effect and truth of the passage by striking out the words "about poor Charlotte." Sir Walter's ire was roused when the When Sir Walter visited Paris in 1826. government brought in a bill which would he put up at the Hôtel de Windsor in the have abolished one-pound notes in Scot-Rue de Rivoli, and entered in his journal: land if passed into law; he wrote pam-"We are in the midst of what can be seen, phlets against the measure under the name of Malachi Malagrowther, and he took part in meetings and acted on a committee to petition for the retention of the notes. Referring to the members of the committee, he wrote: They are disconcerted and helpless; just as in the business of the king's visit, when every body threw the weight on me, for which I suffered much in my immediate labor, and after bad health it brought on a violent eruption on my skin, which saved me from a fever at the time, but has been troublesome more or less ever since. and we are very comfortably fed and are called a new work in its present form. Those who read it will find it fresh as well as interesting, and what is quite as noteworthy, they may rely upon the fidel. ity of the transcript. It has been Mr. Douglas's desire to place before the public Sir Walter's journal almost in the very form that it proceeded from his hands. he made this change by way of a correction he blundered. Cooper's biographer, Mr. Lounsbury, writes, there was in his manner at times "a self-assertion that bordered, or seemed to border on arrogance.' The words in italics, supplying an inter- It is unnecessary to supply further eviesting personal fact which is not told dence to show how untrustworthy are elsewhere, were not reproduced by Lock- some of the extracts from Sir Walter's bart. When Lady Scott's health was im-journal which Lockhart prints in the paired, she was persuaded to see Dr."Life." The result is that the journal as Abercrombie, whose opinion was unfa- a whole, and not in parts only, may be vorable, and Sir Walter wrote that, though her condition was what he had long suspected, "yet the avowal of the truth and its probable consequences are overwhelming." In Lockhart's version he is made to say, "yet the announcement of the truth is overwhelming." In this case as in other cases the change is comparatively trifling, but why make it? If Pepys's Diary" were edited in the same fashion how much would it lose? Commenting upon the changeable weather one day in March, Sir Walter wrote: " It is ungenial, and gives chilblains. Besides, with its whiteness, and its coldness, and its glister, and its discomfort, it resembles a vain, cold, empty, beautiful woman." The words in italics, which Lockhart omitted, serve a purpose which he cannot have perceived; they light up and diversify the sentence. Sir Walter wrote: "Then It is an interesting but a melancholy work, the time during which it was penned being those later years in Sir Walter's career when misfortune overtook him and his health failed, the strong man growing old before his time, yet maintaining a stout fight with difficulties, and earning universal respect by his high-spirited conduct. He was proud to think that he was of gentle blood, and his whole life proved him to be a gentleman to the core. Sir Walter Scott was fifty-four when he began to keep his journal. Though a very prolific writer he was not a pre- cumbrances, he wrote: "If my days of cocious one; he was thirty-four when good fortune should ever return I will lay "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" was pub-out some pretty rides at Abbotsford." It lished, and forty-three at the time of the had the chief place in his heart, and it publication of "Waverley." In the course was, as he said, "his Delilah." Not long of eleven years after "Waverley" had before the catastrophe to his fortunes, made an unparalleled sensation in the and when it was seen that his liabilities reading world, he had produced "Guy amounted to £130,000, he contemplated Mannering" and the "Antiquary," three adding more land to Abbotsford at an outseries of "Tales of My Landlord" and lay of £40,000. "Rob Roy,' ," "Ivanhoe" and "The Monastery, ""The Abbot" and Kenilworth," "The Pirate" and "The Fortunes of Nigel," "Peveril of the Peak" and "Quentin Durward," "St. Ronan's Well," Redgauntlet," and "The Tales of the Crusaders." In addition to this long list of romances, many poems and essays were written during these eleven years, and it is difficult to decide whether the quantity produced or the quality of the work is the more remarkable. A work as wonderful as the others was "Abbotsford; it was as truly a creation as any product of Sir Walter's brain, while it was dearer to his heart than any of his works. The money earned by his pen enabled him to buy the land upon which Abbotsford stands and which surrounds it. The house was described by himself as it was in 1825, for Allan Cunningham's keepsake, called the "Anniversary,' ," which appeared in 1829, the account professedly proceeding from the pen of an American on a visit to Scotland. It is there written: The building is such a one, I dare say, as nobody but he would ever have dreamed of erecting; or if he had, escaped being quizzed for his pains. Yet it is eminently imposing in its general effect; and in most of its details, not only full of historical interest, but beauty also. It is no doubt a thing of shreds and patches, but they have been combined by a masterly hand; and if there be some whimsicalities, that in an ordinary case might have called up a smile, who is likely now or hereafter to contemplate such a monument of such a man's peculiar tastes and fancies without feelings of a far different order? He did not keep his journal many weeks before he made entries betokening impending misfortune. He was engaged in writing" Woodstock;" he had undertaken to write the "Life of Bonaparte;' and he had good reason for counting upon making at least £10,000 yearly by his pen in the future as in the past. No wonder, then, that he considered himself justified in arranging to enlarge the boundaries of Abbotsford. The year 1825 was one of those disastrous years during which the spirit of speculation became rampant, and men who had been cautious embarked their savings in hazardous enterprises and lost them. A member of the firm of Hurst & Robinson, a large publishing house, and the agents in London for Archibald Constable & Co., had speculated in hops to the extent of £100,000; when the money market grew feverish, and this firm required help, none was forthcoming, the result being that the firm failed for about £300,000; the firm of Archibald & Co., being closely connected with it, failed also, the liabilities being £256,000; while the printing house of James Ballantyne & Co. failed for with Messrs. Constable as the latter was £130,000, it being as closely connected with Messrs. Hurst & Robinson. Sir Walter Scott was a partner with Ballantyne, and he was personally responsible for the debts. Hurst & Robinson and Constable & Co. followed the usual mercantile course, and their estate was divided among their creditors, the dividend in the case of the former being Is. 3d. and of the latter 2s. 9d., in the pound. Sir Walter Scott undertook to discharge the liabilities of the firm to which he belonged, of which, as he wrote in his journal, £30,000 had been incurred without his being a party to their contraction." What gives a painful interest to his journal is the circumstance of the catastrophe, and the struggle through the remainder of his life to become what he called "a free man." 66 On the 16th of January, 1826, he learned his position; a few days afterwards he assigned his whole estate to trustees for the |