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not, recognised or not; and he who departs | time be composed, if necessary, by whosoever from it, what can he do but spread himself has call to that. As it is, as it was meant to into breadth and length, into superficiality and be, we repeat, the work is vigorously done. saleability; and, except as filigree, become Sagacity, decision, candour, diligence, good comparatively useless? One thinks, had but sense: these qualities are throughout observathe hogshead of thin wash, which sours in a ble. The dates, calculations, statements, we week ready for the kennels, been distilled, been suppose to be accurate; much laborious in concentrated! Our dear Fenimore Cooper, quiry, some of it impossible for another whom we started with, might, in that way, man, has been gone into, the results of which have given us one Natty Leatherstocking, one are imparted with due brevity. Scott's letters, melodious synopsis of man and nature in the not interesting generally, yet never absolutely West, (for it lay in him to do it,) almost as a without interest, are copiously given; copiously, Saint Pierre did for the islands of the East; but with selection; the answers to them still and the hundred incoherences, cobbled hastily more select. Narrative, delineation, and at together by order of Colburn and Company, length personal reminiscences, occasionly of had slumbered in Chaos, as all incoherences much merit, of a certain rough force, sincerity, ought if possible to do. Verily this same ge- and picturesqueness, duly intervene. nius of diffuse-writing, of diffuse-acting, is a scattered members of Scott's Life do lie here, Moloch; and souls pass through the fire to and could be disentangled. In a word, this him more than enough. Surely if ever disco- compilation is the work of a manful, clearvery was valuable and needful, it were that seeing, conclusive man, and has been executed above indicated, of paying by the work not vi- with the faculty and combination of faculties sibly done!-Which needful discovery we will the public had a right to expect from the name give the whole projecting, railwaying, know-attached to it. ledge-diffusing, march-of-intellect, and otherwise promotive and locomotive societies in the Old and New World, any required length of centuries to make. Once made, such discovery once made, we too will fling cap into the air, and shout Io Paan, the Devil is conquered; and in the meanwhile study to think it nothing miraculous that seven biographical volumes are given where one had been better; and that several other things happen, very much as they from of old were known to do, and are like to continue doing.

Mr. Lockhart's aim, we take it, was not that of producing any such highflown work of art as we hint at: or indeed to do much other than to print, intelligibly bound together by order of time, and some requisite intercalary exposition, all such letters, documents, and notices about Scott as he found lying suitable, and as it seemed likely the world would undertake to read. His work, accordingly, is not so much a composition, as what we may call a compilation well done. Neither is this a task of no difficulty; this too is a task that may be performed with extremely various degrees of talent: from the "Life and Correspondence of Hannah More," for instance, up to this "Life of Scott," there is a wide range indeed! Let us take the seven volumes, and be thankful that they are genuine in their kind. Nay, as to that of their being seven and not one, it is right to say that the public so required it. To have done other would have shown little policy in an author. Had Mr. Lockhart laboriously compressed himself, and instead of well-done compilation, brought out the well-done composition in one volume instead of seven, which not many men in England are better qualified to do, there can be no doubt that his readers for the time had been immeasurably fewer. If the praise of magnanimity be denied him, that of prudence must be conceded, which perhaps he values

more.

The truth is, the work, done in this manner, too, was good to have: Scott's Biography, if uncomposed, lies printed and indestructible here, in the elementary state, and can at any

One thing we hear greatly blamed in Mr. Lockhart: that he has been too communicative, indiscreet, and has recorded much that ought to have lain suppressed. Persons are mentioned, and circumstances, not always of an ornamental sort. It would appear there is far less reticence than was looked for! Various persons, name and surname, have “received pain:" nay, the very hero of the biography is rendered unheroic; unornamental facts of him, and of those he had to do with, being set forth in plain English: hence "personality," "indiscretion," or worse," sanctities of private life," &c. &c. How delicate, decent is English biography, bless its mealy mouth! A Damocles' sword of Respectability hangs for ever over the poor English life-writer, (as it does over poor English life in general,) and reduces him to the verge of paralysis. Thus it has been said, "there are no English lives worth reading except those of Players, who by the nature of the case have bidden Respectability good day." The English biographer has long felt that if in writing his Man's Biography, he wrote down any thing that could by possi bility offend any man, he had written wrong. The plain consequence was that, properly speaking, no biography whatever could be produced. The poor biographer, having the fear not of God before his eyes, was obliged to retire as it were into vacuum; and write in the most melancholy, straitened manner, with only vacuum for a result. Vain that he wrote, and that we kept reading volume on volume; there was no biography, but some vague ghost of a biography, white, stainless; without feature or substance; vacuum, as we say, and wind and shadow,-which indeed the material of it was.

No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving of fence. His life is a battle, in so far as it is an entity at all. The very oyster, we suppose, comes in collision with oysters: undoubtedly enough it does come in collision with Necessity and Difficulty; and helps itself through, not as a perfect ideal oyster, but as an imper

fect real one. Some kind of remorse must be fore his eyes, and no other fear whatever known to the oyster; certain hatreds, certain Censure the biographer's prudence; dissent pusillanimities. But as for man, his conflict from the computation he made, or agree with is continual with the spirit of contradiction, it; be all malice of his, be all falsehood, nay, that is without and within; with the evil spirit, be all offensive avoidable inaccuracy, con(or call it with the weak, most necessitous, demned and consumed; but know that by this pitiable spirit,) that is in others and in him- plan only, executed as was possible, could the self. His walk, like all walking, (say the me- biographer hope to make a biography and chanicians,) is a series of falls. To paint blame him not that he did what it had been man's life is to represent these things. Let the worst fault not to do. them be represented, fitly, with dignity and measure; but above all, let them be represented. No tragedy of Hamlet, with the part of Hamlet omitted by particular desire! No ghost of a Biography, let the Damocles' sword of Respectability (which after all is but a pasteboard one) threaten as it will! One hopes that the public taste is much mended in this matter! that vacuum-biographies, with a good many other vacuities related to them, are withdrawn or withdrawing into vacuum. Probably it was Mr. Lockhart's feeling of what the great public would approve that led him, open-eyed, into this offence against the small criticising public; we joyfully accept the

omen.

As to the accuracy or error of these statements about the Ballantynes and other persons aggrieved, which are questions much mooted at present in some places, we know nothing at all. If they are inaccurate, let them be corrected; if the inaccuracy was avoidable, let the author bear rebuke and punishment for it. We can only say, these things carry no look of inaccuracy on the face of them; neither is anywhere the smallest trace of illwill or unjust feeling discernible. Decidedly the probabilities are, and till better evidence arise, the fair conclusion is, that the matter stands very much as it ought to do. Let the clatter of censure, therefore, propagate itself as far as it can. For Mr. Lockhart it virtually amounts to this very considerable praise, that, standing full in the face of the public, he has set at naught, and been among the first to do it, a public piece of cant; one of the commonest we have, and closely allied to many others of the fellest sort, as smooth as it looks.

Perhaps then, of all the praises copiously bestowed on his work, there is none in reality so creditable to him as this same censure, which has also been pretty copious. It is a censure better than a good many praises. He is found guilty of having said this and that, calculated not to be entirely pleasant to this The other censure, of Scott being made unman and that; in other words, calculated to heroic, springs from the same stem; and is, give him the thing he worked in a living set perhaps, a still more wonderful flower of it of features, not leave him vague, in the white Your true hero must have no features, but be beatified ghost condition. Several men, as white, stainless, an impersonal ghost-hero! we hear, cry out, "See, there is something But connected with this, there is a hypothesis written not entirely pleasant to me! Good now current, due probably to some man of friend, it is pity: but who can help it? They name, for its own force would not carry it far; that will crowd about bonfires may, sometimes That Mr. Lockhart at heart has a dislike to very fairly, get their beards singed; it is the Scott, and has done his best in an underhand price they pay for such illumination; natural treacherous manner to dishero him! Such twilight is safe and free to all. For our part, hypothesis is actually current: he that has we hope all manner of biographies that are ears may hear it now and then. On which written in England will henceforth be written astonishing hypothesis, if a word must be so. If it is fit that they be written otherwise, said, it can only be an apology for silence, then it is still fitter that they be not written at "that there are things at which one stands all: to produce not things, but ghosts of things, struck silent, as at first sight of the Infinite." can never be the duty of man. The biogra- For if Mr. Lockhart is fairly chargeable with pher has this problem set before him to de- any radical defect, if on any side his insight lineate a likeness of the earthly pilgrimage of entirely fails him, it seems even to be in this, a man. He will compute well what profit is that Scott is altogether lovely to him; that in it, and what disprofit; under which latter Scott's greatness spreads out for him on all head this of offending any of his fellow-crea- hands beyond reach of eye; that his very tures will surely not be forgotten. Nay, this faults become beautiful, his vulgar worldli may so swell the disprofit side of his account, nesses are solid prudences, proprieties; and that many an enterprise of biography, other- of his worth there is no measure. Does not wise promising, shall require to be renounced. the patient biographer dwell on his Abbots, PiBut once taken up, the rule above all rules is rates, and hasty theatrical scene-paintings; to do it, not to do the ghost of it. In speaking affectionately analyzing them, as if they were of the man and men he has to deal with, he Raphael pictures, time-defying Hamlets, Othellos? will of course keep all his charities about The novel-manufactory, with his £15,000 a him, but also all his eyes open. Far be it year, is sacred to him as creation of a genius, from him to set down aught untrue; nay, not which carries the noble victor up to heaven. to abstain from, and leave in oblivion, much Scott is to Lockhart the unparalleled of the mat is true. But having found a thing or time; an object spreading out before him like things essential for his subject, and well com- a sea without shore. Of that astonishing hypoputed the for and against, he will in very deed thesis, let expressive silence be the only an set down such thing or things, nothing doubt-swer. ing,—having, we may say, the fear of God be

And so in sum, with regard to "Lockhart's

Life of Scott," readers that believe in us shall read it with the feeling that a man of talent, decision, and insight wrote it; wrote it in seven volumes, not in one, because the public would pay for it better in that state; but wrote it with courage, with frankness, sincerity; on the whole, in a very readable, recommendable manner, as things go. Whosoever needs it can purchase it, or the loan of it, with assurance more than usual that he has ware for his money. And now enough of the written life; we will glance a little at the man and his acted life.

time, all dark and poor, a maimed soldier; writing his Don Quixote in prison. And Lope's fate withal was sad, his popularity perhaps a curse to him; for in this man there was something ethereal too, a divine particle traceable in few other popular men; and such far shining diffusion of himself, though all the world swore by it, would do nothing for the true life of him even while he lived: he had to creep into a convent, into a monk's cowl, and learn, with infinite sorrow, that his blessedness had lain elsewhere; that when a man's life feels itself to be sick and an error, no voting of by-standers can make it well and a truth again. Or coming down to our own times, was not August Kotzebue popular? Kotzebue, not so many years since, saw himself, if rumour and hand-clapping could be credited, the greatest man going; saw visibly his Thoughts, dressed out in plush and pasteboard, permeating and perambulating civilized Europe; the most iron visages weeping with him, in all theatres from Cadiz to Kamschatka; his own "astonishing genius," meanwhile, producing two tragedies or so per month: he on the whole blazed high enough: he too has gone out into Night and Orcus, and already is not. We will omit this of popularity altogether, and account it as making simply nothing towards Scott's greatness or nongreatness, as an accident, not a quality.

Into the question whether Scott was a great man or not, we do not propose to enter deeply. It is, as too usual, a question about words. There can be no doubt but many men have been named and printed great who were vastly smaller than he: as little doubt moreover that of the specially good a very large portion, according to any genuine standard of man's worth, were worthless in comparison to him. He for whom Scott is great may most innocently name him so; may with advantage admire his great qualities, and ought with sincere heart to emulate them. At the same time, it is good that there be a certain degree of precision in our epithets. It is good to understand, for one thing, that no popularity, and open-mouthed wonder of all the world, continued even for a long series of years, can Shorn of this falsifying nimbus, and reduced make a man great. Such popularity is a re- to his own natural dimensions, there remains markable fortune; indicates a great adaptation the reality, Walter Scott, and what we can find of the man to his element of circumstances; in him: to be accounted great, or not great, but may or may not indicate any thing great in according to the dialects of men. Friends to the man. To our imagination, as above precision of epithet will probably deny his title hinted, there is a certain apotheosis in it; but to the name "great." It seems to us there in the reality no apotheosis at all. Popularity goes other stuff to the making of great men is as a blaze of illumination, or alas, of con- than can be detected here. One knows not flagration kindled round a man; showing what what idea worthy of the name of great, what is in him; not putting the smallest item more purpose, instinct, or tendency, that could be into him; often abstracting much from him; called great, Scott ever was inspired with. conflagrating the poor man himself into ashes His life was worldly; his ambitions were and caput mortuum! And then, by the nature worldly. There is nothing spiritual in him; of it, such popularity is transient; your "series all is economical, material, of the earth earthy. of years," quite unexpectedly, sometimes al- A love of picturesque, of beautiful, vigorous, most all on a sudden, terminates! For the and graceful things; a genuine love, yet not stupidity of men, especially of men congre- more genuine than has dwelt in hundreds of gated in masses round any object, is extreme. men named minor poets: this is the highest What illuminations and conflagrations have quality to be discerned in him. His power kindled themselves, as if new heavenly suns of representing these things too, his poetic had risen, which proved only to be tar-barrels, power, like his moral power, was a genius in and terrestrial locks of straw! Profane extenso, as we may say, not in intenso. In acprincesses cried out, "One God, one Fari- tion, in speculation, broad as he was, he rose nelli!"-and whither now have they and Fari- nowhere high; productive without measure as nelli danced? In literature, too, there have to quantity, in quality he for the most part been seen popularities greater even than transcended but a little way the region of Scott's, and nothing perennial in the interior commonplace. It has been said, “no man has of them. Lope de Vega, whom all the world written as many volumes with so few senswore by, and made a proverb of; who could tences that can be quoted." Winged words make an acceptable five-act tragedy in almost were not his vocation; nothing urged him 'hat as many hours; the greatest of all popularities way: the great mystery of existence was not past or present, and perhaps one of the great-great to him; did not drive him into rocky est men that ever ranked among popularities: Lope himself, so radiant, far-shining, has not proved to be a sun or star of the firmament; but is as good as lost and gone out, or plays at best, in the eyes of some few, as a vague aurora-borealis, and brilliant ineffectuality. The great man of Spain sat obscure at the

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solitudes to wrestle with it for an answer, to be answered or to perish. He had nothing of the martyr; into no dark region to slay monsters for us," did he, either led or driven, venture down: his conquests were for his owu behoof mainly, conquests over common mar ket labour, and reckonable in good metallic

coin of the realm. The thing he had faith in, | to burn up the miseries of men. Conscious of except power, power of what sort soever, and unconscious, latent or unfolded, there is small even of the rudest sort, would be difficult to vestige of any such fire being extant in the point out. One sees not that he believed in inner-man of Scott. any thing; nay, he did not even disbelieve; but quietly acquiesced, and made himself at home in a world of conventionalities: the false, the semi-false, and the true were alike true in this, that they were there, and had power in their hands more or less. It was well to feel so; and yet not well! We find it written, Wo to them that are at ease .in Zion;" but surely it is a double wo to them that are at ease in Babel, in Domdaniei. On the other hand he wrote many volumes, amusing many thousands of men. Shall we call this great? It seems to us there dwells and struggles another sort of spirit in the inward parts of great men!

Yet on the other hand, the surliest critic must allow that Scott was a genuine man, which itself is a great matter. No affectation, fantasticality, or distortion, dwelt in him; no shadow of cant. Nay, withal, was he not a right brave and strong man, according to his kind? What a load of toil, what a measure of felicity, he quietly bore along with him; with what quiet strength he both worked on this earth, and enjoyed in it; invincible to evil fortune and to good! A most composed invincible man; in difficulty and distress, knowing no discouragement, Samson-like, carrying off on his strong Samson-shoulders the gates that would imprison him; in danger and menace, laughing at the whisper of fear. And then, with such a sunny current of true humour and humanity, a free joyful sympathy with so many things; what of fire he had, all lying so beautifully latent, as radical latent heat, as fruitful internal warmth of life; a most robust, healthy man! The truth is, our best definition of Scott were perhaps even this, that he was, if no great man, then something much pleasanter to be, a robust, thoroughly healthy, and withal, very prosperous and victorious man. An eminently well-conditioned man, healthy in body, healthy in soul; we will call him one of the healthics of men. Neither is this a small matter: health is a great matter, both to the possessor of it and to others. On the whole, that humourist in the Moral Essay was not so far out, who determined on honouring health only; and so instead of humbling himself to the highborn, to the rich and well-dressed, in

Brother Ringletub, the missionary, inquired of Ram-Dass, a Hindoo man-god, who had set up for godhood lately, What he meant to do, then, with the sins of mankind? To which Ram-Dass at once answered, he had fire enough in his belly to burn up all the sins in the world. Ram-Dass was right so far, and had a spice of sense in him; for surely it is the test of every divine man this same, and without it he is not divine or great,-that he have fire in him to burn up somewhat of the sins of the world, of the miseries and errors of the world: why else is he there? Far be it from us to say that a great man must needs, with benevolence prepense, become a "friend of humanity;" nay, that such professional self-conscious friends of humanity are not the fatalest kind of persons to be met with in our day. All greatness is unconscious, or it is little and naught. And yet a great man without such fire in him, burning dim or developed as a di-sisted on doffing hat to the healthy: coronetted vine behest in his heart of hearts, never resting till it be fulfilled, were a solecism in nature. A great man is ever, as the Transcendentalists speak, possessed with an idea. Napoleon himself, not the superfinest of great men, and ballasted sufficiently with prudences and egoisms, had nevertheless, as is clear enough, an idea to start with the idea that Democracy was the Cause of Man, the right and infinite Cause. Accordingly he made himself "the armed soldier of Democracy;" and did vindicate it in a rather great manner. Nay, to the very last, he had a kind of idea, that, namely, of “la carriére ouverte aux talens, the tools to him that can handle them;" really one of the best ideas yet promulgated on that matter, or rather the one true central idea, towards which all the others, if they tend anywhither, must tend. Unhappily it was in the military province only that Napoleon could realize this idea of his, being forced to fight for himself the while: before he got it tried to any extent in the civil province of things, his head by much victory grew light, (no head can stand more than its quantity;) and he lost head, as they say, and became a selfish ambitionist and quack, and was hurled out, leaving his idea to be realized, in the civil province of things, by others! Thus was Napoleon; thus are all great men: children of the idea; or, in Ram-Dass's phraseology, furnished with fire

carriages with pale faces in them passed by as failures miserable and lamentable; trucks with ruddy-cheeked strength dragging at them were greeted as successful and venerable. For does not health mean harmony, the synonym of all that is true, justly-ordered, good; is it not, in some sense, the net-total, as shown by experiment, of whatever worth is in us? The healthy man is a most meritorious product of nature, so far as he goes. A healthy body is good; but a soul in right health, it is the thing beyond all others to be prayed for; the blessedest thing this earth receives of Heaven. Without artificial medicament of philosophy, or tight-lacing of creeds, (always very questionable,) the healthy soul discerns what is good, and adheres to it, and retains it; discerns what is bad, and spontaneously casts it off. An instinct from nature herself, like that which guides the wild animals of the forest to their food, shows him what he shall do, what he shall abstain from. The false and foreign will not adhere to him; cant and all fantastic, diseased incrustations are impossibleas Walker the Original, in such eminence of health was he for his part, could not by much abstinence from soap and water, altain to a dirty face! This thing thou canst work with and profit by, this thing is substantial and worthy; that other thing thou canst not work with, it is trivial and inapt: so

speaks unerringly the inward monition of the | man's whole nature. No need of logic to prove the most argumentative absurdity absurd; as Goethe says of himself, "all this ran down from me like water from a man in wax-cloth dress." Blessed is the healthy nature; it is the coherent, sweetly co-operative, not incoherent, self-distracting, self-destructive one! In the harmonious adjustment and play of all the faculties, the just balance of oneself gives a just feeling towards all men and all things. Glad light from within radiates outwards, and enlightens and embellishes.

Had the Edial Boarding-school turned out well, we had never heard of Samuel Johnson; Samuel Johnson had been a fat schoolmaster and dogmatic gerundgrinder, and never know that he was more. Nature is rich: those two eggs thou art eating carelessly to breakfast, could they not have been hatched into a pair of fowls, and have covered the whole world with poultry?

But it was not harrying of cattle in Tynedale, or cracking of crowns at Reds wire, that this stout Border chief was appointed to perform. Far other work. To be the song. singer and pleasant tale-teller to Britain and Europe, in the beginning of the artificial nineteenth century; here, and not there, lay his business. Beardie of Harden would have found it very amazing. How he shapes himself to this new element; how he helps himself along in it, makes it too do for him, lives sound and victorious in it, and leads over the marches such a spoil as all the cattle-droves the Hardens ever took were poor in comparison to: this is the history of the life and achievements of our Sir Walter Scott, Baronet; -whereat we are now to glance for a little! It is a thing remarkable; a thing substantial; of joyful, victorious sort; not unworthy to be glanced at. Withal, however, a glance here and there will suffice. Our limits are narrow; the thing, were it never so victorious, is not of the sublime sort, nor extremely edifying, there is nothing in it to censure vehemently, nor love vehemently: there is more to wonder at than admire; and the whole secret is not an abstruse one.

Till towards the age of thirty, Scott's lif has nothing in it decisively pointing towards literature, or indeed towards distinction of any kind; he is wedded, settled, and has gone through all his preliminary steps, without symptoms of renown as yet. It is the life of every other Edinburgh youth of his station and time. Fortunate we must name it, in many ways. Parents in easy or wealthy circumstances, yet unencumbered with the cares and

Now all this can be predicated of Walter Scott, and of no British literary man that we remember in these days, to any such extent, if it be not perhaps of one, the most opposite imaginable to Scott, but his equal in this quality and what holds of it: William Cobbett! Nay, there are other similarities, widely different as they two look; nor be the comparison disparaging to Scott: for Cobbett also, as the pattern John Bull of his century, strong as the rhinoceros, and with singular humanities and genialities shining through his thick skin, is a most brave phenomenon. So bounteous was Nature to us; in the sickliest of recorded ages, when British literature lay all puking and sprawling in Werterism, Byronism, and other sentimentalism, tearful or spasmodic, (fruit of internal wind,) Nature was kind enough to send us two healthy Men, of whom she might still say, not without pride, "These also were made in England; such limbs I still make there!" It is one of the cheerfullest sights, let the question of its greatness be settled as you will. A healthy nature may or may not be great; but there is no great nature that is not healthy. Or, on the whole, might we not say, Scott, in the new vesture of the nineteenth century, was intrinsically very much the old fighting Borderer of prior centuries; the kind of man Nature did of old make in that birthland of his? In the saddle, with the forayspear, he would have acquitted himself as he did at the desk with his pen. One fancies how in stout Beardie of Harden's time, he could have played Beardie's part; and been the stal-perversions of aristocracy: nothing eminent wart buff-belted terræ filius he in this late time could only delight to draw. The same stout self-help was in him; the same oak and triple brass round his heart. He too could have fought at Redswire, cracking crowns with the fiercest, if that had been the task; could have harried cattle in Tynedale, repaying injury with compound interest; a right sufficient captain of men. A man without qualms or fantasticalities; a hard-headed, sound-hearted man, of joyous robust temper, looking to the main chance, and fighting direct thitherward: valde stalwartus homo-How much in that case had slumbered in him, and passed away without sign. But indeed, who knows how much slumbers in many men. Perhaps our greatest poets are the mute Miltons; the vocal are those whom by happy accident we lay hold of, one here, one there, as it chances, and make vocal. It is even a question, whether, had not want, discomfort, and distress-warrants been busy at Stratford-on-Avon Shakspeare himself had not lived killing calves or combing wool!

in place, in faculty, or culture, yet nothing deficient; all around is methodic regulation, prudence, prosperity, kind-heartedness; an element of warmth and light of affection, industry, and burgherly comfort, heightened into elegance; in which the young heart can wholesomely grow. A vigorous health seems to have been given by Nature; yet, as if Nature had said withal, "Let it be a health to express itself by mind, not by body," a lameness is added in childhood; the brave little boy, instead of romping and bickering, must learn to think; or at lowest, what is a great matter, to sit still. No rackets and trundlinghoops for this young Walter; but ballads, history-books, and a world of ́egendary stuff, which his mother and those near him are copiously able to furnish. Disease, which 18 but superficial, and issues in outward lameness, does not cloud the young existence, rather forwards it towards the expansion it is fitted for. The miserable disease had been one of the internal nobler parts, marring the

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