Lockhart thinks that
never, after this attack, did his style recover its full lucidity and
terseness. A cloudiness in words and a cloudiness of arrangement began
to be visible. In the course of the year he retired from his duties of
clerk of session, and his publishers hoped that, by engaging him on
the new and complete edition of his works, they might detach him from
the attempt at imaginative creation for which he was now so much less
fit. But Sir Walter's will survived his judgment. When, in the
previous year, Ballantyne had been disabled from attending to business
by his wife's illness (which ended in her death), Scott had written in
his diary, "It is his (Ballantyne's) nature to indulge apprehensions
of the worst which incapacitate him for labour. I cannot help
regarding this amiable weakness of the mind with something too nearly
allied to contempt," and assuredly he was guilty of no such weakness
himself. Not only did he row much harder against the stream of fortune
than he had ever rowed with it, but, what required still more
resolution, he fought on against the growing conviction that his
imagination would not kindle, as it used to do, to its old heat.
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