of an historical novel (afterwards Waverley) in 1805, and in 1808 he had taken up the useful task of preparing for the press an antiquarian story by Strutt, called Quenhoo Hall. His long poems of the same decade had necessitated the approach to historical study in a romantic and yet human Sir Walter Scott From a Sketch by Sir Edwin Landseer spirit. From his earliest years Scott had been laying up, from Scottish and from German sources, impressions which were to be definitely useful to him in the creation of his great novels. At last, in the maturity of forty-three years, he began the gigantic work which he was not to abandon until his death in 1832. It is difficult to speak of the novels of Sir Walter Scott in a perfectly critical spirit. They are a cherished part of the heritage of the English-speaking race, and in discussing them we cannot bring ourselves to use regarding them anything but what to foreign critics seems the language of hyperbole. The noble geniality of attitude which they discover in the author, their perennial freshness, their variety, their "magnifi cent train of events," make us impatient of the briefest reference to their shortcomings in execution. But it is, perhaps, not the highest loyalty to Scott to attempt to deny that his great books have patent faults: that the conduct of the story in Rob Roy is primitive, that the heroines of Ivanhoe are drawn with no psychological subtlety, that there is a great deal that is terribly heavy and unexhilarating in the pages of Peveril of the Peak. It is best, surely, to admit all this, to allow that Scott sometimes wrote too rapidly and too loosely, that his antiquarianism sometimes ran away with him, that his M shrill toung' tuckete Hand to thy lenstock queror let they canton Came sherche in turbanel hanked to storm the ramparts And I'm a Page of the MS. of "Kenilworth " pictures of medieval manners are not always quite convincing. He has not the inevitable perfection of Jane Austen; he makes no effort to present himself to us as so fine an artist. When this is admitted, let the enemy make the best they can of it. We may challenge the literatures of the world to produce a purer talent, or a writer who has with a more brilliant and sustained vivacity combined the novel with the romance, the tale of manners with the tale of wonder. Scott's early ideal was Fielding, and he began the Waverley series in rivalry with Tom Jones, but he soon left his master. If Scott has not quite the intense sympathy with humanity, nor quite the warm blood of Fielding, he Original Sketch by Cruikshank for "Meg Merrilies" has resources which the earlier novelist never dreamed of. His design was to please the modern world by presenting a tale of the Middle Ages, and to do this he had to combat a wide ignorance of and lack of sympathy with history; to create, without a model, homely as well as histrionic scenes of ancient life; to enliven and push on the narrative by incessant contrasts, high with low, tragic with facetious, philosophical with adventurous. His first idea was, to dwell as exclusively as possible with Scottish chivalry. But Guy Mannering, once severely judged by the very admirers of Scott, now esteemed as one of his best books, showed what genius for humorous portraiture was possessed by the creator of Dandie Dinmont and Dominie Sampson; while the Antiquary, in its pictures of seaside life in a fishingtown of Scotland, showed how close and how vivid was to be his observation of rustic society. In all the glorious series there are but two which a lover of Scott would wish away. It is needless to mention them; their very names recall to us Sunsel The sun upon the Weirdlaw hill ut The westland wind is hush and sule The laker has seeping at yet not the landscape to mummys Bears the sucks bought hopes that ever I love реши with listless along the plum The дишь The hell the stream the lower the true Are they still such asenu they won Alus! Me warped and broken bound To aching eyes each Landscapi lowers Si fuerish pulse each gule blows chill Avene barven as thus moorland hill. Facsimile of MS. Verses of Scott that honourable tragedy of over-strain, of excessive imaginative labour, which bowed his head at length to the ground. The life of Scott, with its |