William Blackwood had now arrived nearly at the end of his laborious and dutiful life—a life so checkered with excitement, so weighted with anxieties and cares, so full at once of the difficulties of a leader, the responsible head of a daring and anonymous regiment, always ready for mischief, and those of a man of business, compelled to make provision for many hazardous undertakings, that his energies were over-strained and his strength exhausted when the crisis came. He was only fifty-seven—comparatively young, as we reckon age in this long-lived generation—when his fatal malady began to creep upon him. During the last four years of his life the labours which he had so long met single-handed were softened to him, as has been seen, by the work and support of his sons,—Alexander becoming more and more the right hand of his father, with much of the instinctive critical insight and divination of the tastes of the public which form the genius of the publisher—while Robert developed into a keen man of business, and in his different fashion promised equal usefulness. The father was thus able so to arrange the framework of his undertakings, though all-unconscious of the necessity of such a proceeding, that it was possible without breach or convulsion to carry everything on, and continue as he had planned it even when his presiding judgment was no longer there.