Old Mortality, while 1817 saw Harold the Dauntless and Rob Roy. The enormous strain which S. had been undergoing as official, man of letters, and man of business, began at length to tell upon him, and in this same year, 1817, he had the first of a series of severe seizures of cramp in the stomach, to which, however, his indomitable spirit refused to yield, and several of his next works, The Heart of Midlothian (1818), by many considered his masterpiece, The Bride of Lammermoor, The Legend of Montrose, and Ivanhoe, all of 1819, were dictated to amanuenses, while he was too ill to hold a pen. In 1820 The Monastery, in which the public began to detect a falling off in the powers of the still generally unknown author, appeared. The immediately following Abbot, however, showed a recovery. Kenilworth and The Pirate followed in 1821, The Fortunes of Nigel in 1822; Peveril of the Peak, Quentin Durward, and St. Ronan's Well in 1823; Redgauntlet in 1824, and Tales of the Crusaders (The Betrothed and The Talisman) in 1825. By this time S. had long reached a pinnacle of fame such as perhaps no British man of letters has ever attained during his lifetime. He had for a time been the most admired poet of his day, and though latterly somewhat eclipsed by Byron, he still retained great fame as a poet. He also possessed a great reputation as an antiquary, one of the chief revivers of interest in our ancient literature, and as the biographer and ed. of several of our great writers; while the incognito which he maintained in regard to his novels was to many a very partial veil. The unprecedented profits of his writings had made him, as he believed, a man of wealth; his social prestige was immense; he had in 1820 been made a baronet, when that was still a real distinction, and he had been the acknowledged representative of his country when the King visited it in 1822. All this was now to change, and the fabric of prosperity which he had raised by his genius and labour, and which had never spoiled the simplicity and generosity of his character, was suddenly to crumble into ruin with, however, the result of revealing him as the possessor of qualities even greater and nobler than any he had shown in his happier days. The publishing and printing firms with which he had been connected fell in the commercial crisis of 1826, and S. found himself at 55, and with failing health, involved in liabilities amounting to £130,000. Never was adversity more manfully and gallantly met. Notwithstanding the crushing magnitude of the disaster and the concurrent sorrow of his wife's illness, which soon issued in her death, he deliberately set himself to the herculean task of working off his debts, asking only that time might be given him. The secret of his authorship was now, of course, revealed, and his efforts were crowned with a marvellous measure of success. Woodstock, his first publication after the crash, appeared in the same year and brought £8000; by 1828 he had earned £40,000. In 1827 The Two Drovers, The Highland Widow, and The Surgeon's Daughter, forming the first series of Chronicles of the Canongate, appeared together with The Life of Napoleon in 9 vols., and the first series of Tales of a Grandfather; in 1828 The Fair Maid of Perth and the second series of Tales of a Grandfather, Anne of Geierstein, a third series of the Tales, and the commencement of a complete ed. of the novels in 1829; a fourth and last series of Tales, History of Scotland, and other work in 1830. Then at last the overworked brain gave way, and during this year
