The Abbotsford Subscription.

Disbound. Octavo: four pages. Good: slightly aged and with some creasing to extremities. Thirty-one lines of text, followed by a double-column list of subscribers, and amounts subscribed. Dundas explains how the commercial crisis of 1825 'involved Sir WALTER SCOTT in losses to an extent alike unprepared for, but which ultimately proved not less than 120,000l.' In 'devoting his talents to the acquittal of obligations not originally, though legally his own, he laboured with a degree of assiduity, and an intenseness of anxiety, whcih sortened his existence by overstrained intellectual exertion. [...] It is thought that no memorial can be so appropriate to his name, as the permanent maintenance of the house which his residence has rendered classical, and the preservation of a library and collection of national antiquities, which his admirable taste selected'. H.R.H. the Duchess of Kent and the Duchess of St. Albans both topped the list, subscribing a hundred pounds apiece. Miss Fanny Ward was among those at the bottom, with a subscription of five shillings. COPAC records copies at NLS and CUL, not BL.