SIR WALTER SCOTT.

BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY.

By JOHN EBENEZER BRYANT.

SCOTT is incomparably the world's greatest novelist of the romantic school. Nay, more; he is one of the world's very greatest masters of imagination in the literary art. Only a few others as, for example, Dickens can be ranked equal with him. Only a very few — as, for example, Shakespeare - - can be placed in any respect above him. He has his limitations, even as Dickens had, even also as Shakespeare had; but, notwithstanding all these, the verdict of the reading public of to-day, as was that of the reading public of his own time, is that as a creator of fictional character, and especially as a re-creator of the historic past, Scott's genius was second only to that of Shakespeare, if, indeed, in these respects it was not equal to Shakespeare's.

There exists just now a school of critics an exiguous and unfollowed school, however who affect to find Scott's imaginative work insufficiently realistic, and who would therefore rank him as an artist inferior to those ingenious but scarcely highly gifted literary craftsmen whose fine-spun attenuation of frugal incident and plot, and photographic reproduction of merely contemporary

life and character, are the dominant features of the imaginative literature of this last decade of our century.

But because of such an opinion as this, let no ingenuous youth who has formed a taste for reading Scott's romances fear to confess his fondness for them, or fail, if such be his bent, to take generous and enthusiastic pride in his delight in them. The greatest scholars and thinkers of every generation since these romances first began to appear, the greatest masters in every fine and in every industrial art, have taken the same delight in them, and have felt the same exaltation because of their delight in them. For to know Scott is precisely the same kind of knowledge as to know Shakespeare; and to be fond of Scott, to take delight in reading and remembering Scott, gives rise to the same glow and exaltation of feeling that one experiences who is fond of Shakespeare, and who takes delight in reading and remembering Shakespeare.

Walter Scott was born in Edinburgh, Aug. 15, 1771. His father was an attorney—a strictly upright, proud, precise, and formal man, conscientiously methodical and industrious, from whom, no doubt, Scott derived much of his sense of honor, his pride, his conservatism, and his dogged, determined, persevering habits of work. His mother was a well-educated woman, of great power of memory and great faculty for narration; and undoubtedly it is to her that the future novelist's own marvellous power of memory and faculty for narration must be ascribed. But Scott's wonderfully composite character and vast intellectual endowment were derived quite as much from other ancestors as from these immediate ones. He came from a race of border gentry, many of them,

in earlier times, border raiders, moss-troopers, and free lances, and from them, no doubt, inherited that courage, self-confidence, and bold readiness to try throws with fortune at any time, which in prosperous days led him into enterprises which his prudence should have forbidden, and which in days when calamities came pouring thick upon him, gave him not merely fortitude to endure them, but resolute determination heroically to set his face to conquer them.

As a child Scott was precocious far beyond the ordinary, and early gave promise of being a remarkable per

sonage.

Even at six years of age he described himself as "a virtuoso "; as "one who wishes and will know everything." In physique he was delicate and weakly, and for that reason was sent to live much with his grandfather's people in the country. In the outdoor life thus obtained for him, he grew to have a strong and