been accustomed to hard work, because I found it a pleasure; now, with all due respect for Falstaff's principle, 'nothing on compulsion,' I certainly will not shrink from work because it has become necessary."
One of his first tasks was his "Life of Bonaparte," achieved in the space of thirteen months. For this he received fourteen thousand pounds, about eleven hundred per month—not a bad bargain either, as it proved, for the publishers. The first two volumes of the nine which make up the English edition were a rifacimento of what he had before compiled for the "Annual Register." With every allowance for the inaccuracies, and the excessive expansion incident to such a flashing rapidity of execution, the work, taking into view the broad range of its topics, its shrewd and sagacious reflections, and the free, bold, and picturesque colouring of its narration, and, above all, considering the brief time in which it was written, is indisputably one of the most remarkable monuments of genius and industry—perhaps the most remarkable ever recorded.
Scott's celebrity made everything that fell from him, however trifling—the dewdrops from the lion's mane—of value. But none of the many adventures he embarked in, or, rather, set afloat, proved so profitable as the republication of his novels, with his notes and illustrations. As he felt his own strength in the increasing success of his labours, he appears to have relaxed somewhat from them, and to have again resumed somewhat of his ancient habits, and, in a mit-
