Note 3 — LETTER XXXII.
Reading edition
His youth, like the youth of all the greatest men, had been long, and rich in peace, and altogether accumulative and crescent. I count it to end with that pain which you see he remembers to his dying day, given him by—Lilias Redgauntlet, in October, 1796. Whereon he sets himself to his work, which goes on nobly for thirty years, lapping over a little into the death-time3 (‘Woodstock’ showing scarcely a trace of diminution of power).