Their sympathy intrudes on my
present affliction." Again, on returning for the first time from
Edinburgh to Abbotsford after Lady Scott's funeral:--"I again took
possession of the family bedroom and my widowed couch. This was a sore
trial, but it was necessary not to blink such a resolution. Indeed I
do not like to have it thought that there is any way in which I can be
beaten." And again:--"I have a secret pride--I fancy it will be so
most truly termed--which impels me to mix with my distresses strange
snatches of mirth, 'which have no mirth in them.'"[56]
But though pride was part of Scott's strength, pride alone never
enabled any man to struggle so vigorously and so unremittingly as he
did to meet the obligations he had incurred. When he was in Ireland in
the previous year, a poor woman who had offered to sell him
gooseberries, but whose offer had not been accepted, remarked, on
seeing his daughter give some pence to a beggar, that they might as
well give her an alms too, as she was "an old struggler." Sir Walter
was struck with the expression, and said that it deserved to become
classical, as a name for those who take arms against a sea of
troubles, instead of yielding to the waves.
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