the work was remembered when he recovered. "The book," says James Ballantyne, "was not only written, but published, before Mr. Scott was able to rise from his bed; and he assured me that, when it was first put into his hands in a complete shape, he did not recollect one single incident, character, or conversation it contained! He did not desire me to understand, nor did I understand, that his illness had erased from his memory the original incidents of the story, with which he had been acquainted from his boyhood. These remained rooted where they had ever been; or, to speak more explicitly, he remembered the general facts of the existence of the father and mother, of the son and daughter, of the rival lovers, of the compulsory marriage, and the attack made by the bride upon the hapless bridegroom, with the general catastrophe of the whole. All these things he recollected, just as he did before he took to his bed; but he literally recollected nothing else—not a single character woven by the romancer, not one of the many scenes and points of humor, not anything with which he was himself connected, as the writer of the work."
Later, when Scott was breaking down under severe and long-continued labor, and first felt the approach of the illness which ultimately ended in death, he experienced strange mental phenomena. In his diary for February 17, 1829, he notes that on the preceding day, at dinner, though in company with two or three old friends, he was haunted by "a sense of preëxistence," a confused idea that nothing that passed was said for the first time; that the same topics had been discussed, and that the same persons had expressed the same opinions before. "There was a vile sense of a want of reality in all that I did or said."
Dr. Reynolds related to Dr. Carpenter a case in which a Dissenting minister, who was in apparently sound health, was rendered apprehensive of brain-disease—though, as it seemed, without occasion—by a lapse of memory similar to that experienced by Sir Walter Scott. He "went through an entire pulpit service on a certain Sunday morning with the most perfect consistency—his choice of hymns and lessons and his extempore prayer being all related to the subject of his sermon. On the following Sunday morning he went through the introductory part of the service in precisely the same manner—giving out the same hymns, reading the same lessons, and directing the extempore prayer in the same channel. He then gave out the same text and preached the very same sermon as he had done on the previous Sunday. When he came down from the pulpit it was found that he had not the smallest remembrance of having gone through precisely the same service on the previous Sunday; and, when he was assured of it, he felt considerable uneasiness lest his lapse of memory should indicate some impending attack of illness. None such, however, supervened; and no rationale can be given of this curious occurrence, the subject of it not being liable to fits of "absence of mind," and not having had his thoughts engrossed at the time by any other special preoccupation." It is possible that the
