1771—Born August 15, 1786—Began to study law. 1792—Called to the bar. 1796—Published translation of Buerger’s “Ballads.” 1797—Marriage. 1799—Appointed sheriff of Selkirkshire. 1799—Translated Goethe’s “Goetz von Berlichingen.” 1800—“The Eve of St. John: a Border Ballad.” 1802—“Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.” 1804—Edited “Sir Tristrem,” a Metrical Romance by Thomas of Ercildoune. 1805—“The Lay of the Last Minstrel: a Poem.” 1806—Appointed Clerk of the Sessions. 1806—Edited “Memoirs,” etc. 1808—“Marmion: a Tale of Flodden Field;” Edited the Works of Dryden, 18 vols., and Life; Strutt’s “Queenhoo Hall: a Romance.” 1809—Edited State Papers and Somers’ Collection of Tracts, 1809–15. 1810—“The Lady of the Lake: a Poem;” Edited “English Minstrelsy.” 1811—“The Vision of Don Roderick: a Poem.” 1812—Came to live at Abbotsford. 1813—“Rokeby: a Poem;” “The Bridal of Triermain.” 1814—“Waverley;” Edited The Works of Swift, 19 vols. and Life; “The Border Antiquities,”—1814–17. 1815—“Guy Mannering;” “The Lord of the Isles: a Poem;” “The Field of Waterloo: a Poem.” Edited Memoirs of the Somervilles. 1816—“The Antiquary;” “Tales of My Landlord,” first series (“The Black Dwarf,” “Old Mortality”). 1817—“Harold the Dauntless: a Poem.” 1818—“Rob Roy;” “Tales of My Landlord,” second series (“The Heart of Midlothian”). 1819—“Tales of My Landlord,” third series (“The Bride of Lammermoor,” “The Legend of Montrose”); “Ivanhoe.” 1820—Knighted; “The Monastry;” “The Abbot.” 1821—“Kenilworth;” Edited the Novelists’ Library, 1821–24. 1822—“The Pirate;” “The Fortunes of Nigel;” “Halidon Hill: a Dramatic Sketch;” Much editing. 1823—“Peveril of the Peak;” “Quentin Durward.” 1824—“St. Ronan’s Well;” “Redgauntlet.” 1825—“Tales of the Crusaders” (“The Betrothed,” “The Talisman”). 1826—Failure of the Ballantynes and Scott’s financial distress; death of his wife; “Woodstock.” 1827—“Life of Napoleon Buonaparte,” 9 vols.; “Chronicles of the Canongate,” first series (“The Two Drovers,” “The Highland Widow,” “The Surgeon’s Daughter”); “Tales of a Grandfather,”—1827–30. 1828—Miscellaneous Works Collected, 6 vols.; “Chronicles of the Canongate,” second series (“The Fair Maid of Perth”). 1829—“Anne of Geierstein;” “History of Scotland,”—1829–30. 1830—“Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft.” 1831—Journey to Italy; “Tales of My Landlord,” fourth series (“Count Robert of Paris,” “Castle Dangerous”). 1832—Died September 21.

Personal

  On our mentioning Mr. Scott’s name the woman of the house showed us all possible civility, but her slowness was really amusing. I should suppose it is a house little frequented, for there is no appearance of an inn. Mr. Scott, who she told me was a very clever gentleman, “goes there in the fishing season;” but indeed Mr. Scott is respected everywhere: I believe that by favour of his name one might be hospitably entertained throughout all the borders of Scotland.

  Tall, and rather robust than slender, but lame in the same manner as Mr. Hayley, and in a greater measure. Neither the contour of his face, nor yet his features, are elegant; his complexion healthy, and somewhat fair, without bloom. We find the singularity of brown hair and eyelashes, with flaxen eyebrows, and a countenance open, ingenuous, and benevolent. When seriously conversing or earnestly attentive, though his eyes are rather of a lightish gray, deep thought is on their lids. He contracts his brow, and the rays of genius gleam aslant from the orbs beneath them. An upper lip too long prevents his mouth from being decidedly handsome; but the sweetest emanations of temper and heart play about it when he talks cheerfully or smiles: and in company he is much oftener gay than contemplative. His conversation is an overflowing fountain of brilliant wit, apposite allusion, and playful archness; while, on serious themes, it is nervous and eloquent; the accent decidedly Scotch, yet by no means broad.

  I truly rejoice in your success, and while I am entertaining in my way, a certain set of readers, for the most part, probably, of peculiar turn and habit, I can with pleasure see the effect you produce on all.

  He is, indeed, the lord of the ascendant now in Edinburgh, and well deserves to be, for I look upon him to be quite as remarkable in intercourse and conversation as he is in any of his writings, even in his novels…. His countenance, when at rest, is dull and almost heavy, and even when in common conversation expresses only a high degree of good nature; but when he is excited, and especially when he is reciting poetry that he likes, his whole expression is changed, and his features kindle into a brightness of which there were no traces before.

  He is tall and well formed, excepting one of his ankles and foot—I think the right—which is crippled, and makes him walk very lamely. He is neither fat nor thin. His face is perfectly Scotch, and though some people think it heavy, it struck me as a very agreeable one. He never could have been handsome. His forehead is very high, his nose short, his upper lip long, and the lower part of his face rather fleshy. His complexion fresh and clear, his eyes very blue, shrewd, and penetrating. I should say the predominant expression of his face is that of strong sense. His hair, which has always been very light (as well as his eyebrows and eyelashes) is now of a silvery whiteness, which makes him look somewhat older than he really is.

  My first impression was, that he was neither so large, nor so heavy in appearance as I had been led to expect by description, prints, bust, and picture. He is more lame than I expected, but not unwieldy; his countenance, even by the uncertain light in which I first saw it, pleased me much, benevolent, and full of genius without the slightest effort at expression; delightfully natural, as if he did not know he was Walter Scott or the Great Unknown of the North, as if he only thought of making others happy…. The impression left on my mind this night was, that Walter Scott is one of the best bred men I ever saw, with all the exquisite politeness which he knows so well how to describe, which is of no particular school or country, but which is of all countries, the politeness which arises from good and quick sense and feeling, which seems to know by instinct the characters of others, to see what will please, and put all his guests at their ease. As I sat beside him at supper, I could not believe he was a stranger, and forgot he was a great man.

  An event has just been announced which has thrown our little world into complete astonishment. Constable the bookseller has become bankrupt for a very large sum,—I cannot exactly say how much, and Sir Walter Scott is involved in this misfortune. The grief I felt on this occasion was very different indeed from the qualified sympathy with which Rochefoucault supposes us to regard the misfortunes of our friends. It was keen, deep, and by no means transient; every time I hear any allusion to him I grieve anew. I do not care about Constable personally, yet I find room for a little corner for him, for he has had by two marriages ten children. Next to our Scottish Shakspeare I lament for the kind-hearted, talented, and liberal-minded James Ballantyne…. A person, who to so many high endowments adds a superior portion of sound common sense, could not be quite insensible to the coming storm; but after the blast has passed over he will still be able to say, “All is lost but honour.”

  I do not find that he has, like most other writers of the present day, mixed up his personal feelings and history with his poetry; or that any fair and distinguished object will be so thrice fortunate as to share his laurelled immortality. We must therefore treat him like Shakspeare, whom alone he resembles—and claim him for us all.

  Moore talked of Scott and his wonderful labor and power of composition, as well as the extent to which he has carried the art of book-making; besides writing this history of Scotland for Dr. Lardner’s Encyclopædia, he is working at the prefaces for the republication of the “Waverley Novels,” the “Tales of a Grandfather,” and he has still found time to review Tytler, which he has done out of the scraps and chips of his other works. A little while ago he had to correct some of the proofs of the history of Scotland, and being dissatisfied with what was done, he nearly wrote it over again, and sent it up to the editor. Some time after, finding another copy of the proofs, he forgot that he had corrected them before, and he rewrote these also, and sent them up, and the editor is at this moment engaged in selecting from the two corrected copies the best parts of each.

  I was rather agreeably surprised by his appearance, after all I had heard of its homeliness; the predominant expression of countenance, is, I think, a sort of arch good-nature, conveying a mingled impression of penetration and benevolence.

  He is a tall man, of large but not well-filled frame. His shoulders are remarkably sloping, giving an appearance of great longitude to his neck…. When he walks, one knee bends under him and turns inward, making his progress very slow, and painful to the spectator. His head bald upon the crown,… is certainly the highest above the ears I have ever seen…. In court, he ordinarily appears as if asleep, or retired so far within himself that no thought or motion disturbs the placidity of the exterior surface…. On one occasion, his eye was turned on one of the spectators, and his countenance involuntarily became so quizzically humorous, that I really could not help laughing.

	Lift up your hearts, ye Mourners! for the might
	Of the whole world’s good wishes with him goes;
	Blessings and prayers in nobler retinue
	Than sceptred king or laurell’d conqueror knows,
	Follow this wondrous Potentate.

  Mrs. Arkwright tells me that Miss Siddons, who is at Edinburgh, saw the physician who attended Walter Scott; he gives a melancholy account of his last moments. He died of a softening of the brain, and his features and countenance were so entirely changed, no one could possibly have recognised him. He had been for some time blind, and death came as a release to himself and his friends, who were worn out with watching. The anxiety to hear of him had been so great, that printed bulletins were posted all along the road from Edinburgh to Abbotsford, to prevent the crowds of people from coming to the house to inquire after him.

  Sir Walter was the best formed man I ever saw, and, laying his weak limb out of the question, a perfect model of a man for gigantic strength. The muscles of his arms were prodigious. I remember of one day long ago, I think it was at some national dinner in Oman’s Hotel, that at a certain time of the night, a number of the young heroes differed prodigiously in regard to their various degrees of muscular strength. A general measurement took place around the shoulders and chest, and I, as a particular judge in these matters, was fixed on as the measurer and umpire. Scott, who never threw cold water on any fun, submitted to be measured with the rest. He measured most round the chest, and to their great chagrin, I was next to him, and very little short. But when I came to examine the arms! Sir Walter’s had double the muscular power of mine, and very nearly so of every man’s who was there. I declare, that from the elbow to the shoulder, they felt as if he had the strength of an ox.

  His amiable feeling, on every occasion, led him to assist and encourage all younger authors, and he seemed totally devoid of every spark of that littleness and jealousy which sometimes actuates even the most illustrious and established literati.

  The conversation of Scott was frank, hearty, picturesque and dramatic. During the time of my visit he inclined to the comic rather than the grave, in his anecdotes and stories, and such, I was told, was his general inclination. He relished a joke, or a trait of humor in social intercourse, and laughed with right good will. He talked not for effect, nor display, but from the flow of his spirits, the stores of his memory, and the vigor of his imagination. He had a natural turn for narration, and his narratives and descriptions were without effort, yet wonderfully graphic. He placed the scene before you like a picture; he gave the dialogue with the appropriate dialect or peculiarities, and described the appearance and characters of his personages with that spirit and felicity evinced in his writings. Indeed, his conversation reminded me continually of his novels; and it seems to me, that during the whole time I was with him, he talked enough to fill volumes, and that they could not be filled more delightfully. He was as good a listener as talker, appreciating what others said, however humble might be their rank or pretensions, and was quick to testify his perception of any point in their discourse. He arrogated nothing to himself, but was perfectly unassuming and unpretending, entering with heart and soul into the business, or pleasure, or, I had almost said, folly, of the hour and the company. No one’s concerns, no one’s thoughts, no one’s opinions, no one’s tastes and pleasures seemed beneath him. He made himself so thoroughly the companion of those with whom he happened to be, that they forgot for a time his vast superiority, and only recollected and wondered, when all was over, that it was Scott with whom they had been on such familiar terms, and in whose society they had felt so perfectly at their ease I consider it one of the greatest advantages that I have derived from my literary career, that it has elevated me into genial communion with such a spirit.

  In stature, Sir Walter Scott was upwards of six feet, bulky in the upper part of the body, but never inclining in the least to what is called corpulency. His right limb was shrunk from an early period of boyhood, and required to be supported by a staff, which he carried close to the toes, the heel turning a little inwards. The other limb was perfectly sound, but the foot was too long to bring it within the description of handsome. The chest, arms, and shoulders were those of a strong man; but the frame, in its general movements, must have been enfeebled by his lameness, which was such as to give an ungainly, though not inactive appearance to the figure. The most remarkable part of Sir Walter’s person was his head, which was so very tall and cylindrical as to be quite unique. The measurement of the part below the eyes was fully an inch and a half less than that above, which, both upon the old and the new systems of phrenology, must be held as a striking mark of the intellectuality of his character.

  About half-past one, P.M., on the 21st of September, 1832, Sir Walter breathed his last, in the presence of all his children. It was a beautiful day—so warm that every window was wide open—and so perfectly still that the sound of all others most delicious to his ear, the gentle ripple of the Tweed over its pebbles, was distinctly audible as we knelt around the bed, and his eldest son kissed and closed his eyes…. The more the details of his personal history are revealed and studied, the more powerfully will that be found to inculcate the same great lessons with his works. Where else shall we be taught better how prosperity may be extended by beneficence, and adversity be confronted by exertion? Where can we see the “follies of the wise” more strikingly rebuked, and a character more beautifully purified and exalted in the passage through affliction to death?… His character seems to belong to some elder and stronger period than ours; and, indeed, I cannot help likening it to the architectural fabrics of other ages, which he most delighted in, where there is such a congregation of imagery and tracery, such endless indulgence of whim and fancy, the sublime blending here with the beautiful, and there contrasted with the grotesque—half, perhaps, seen in the clear daylight, and half by rays tinged with the blazoned forms of the past—that one may be apt to get bewildered among the variety of particular impressions, and not feel either the unity of the grand design, or the height and solidness of the structure, until the door has been closed on the labyrinth of aisles and shrines, and you survey it from a distance, but still within its shadow.

  Many people are living who had a most intimate acquaintance with him. I know no more of him than I know of Dryden or Addison, and not a tenth part so much as I know of Swift, Cowper, or Johnson. Then again, I have not, from the little that I do know of him, formed so high an opinion of his character as most people seem to entertain, and as it would be expedient for the Edinburgh Review to express. He seems to me to have been most carefully and successfully on his guard against the sins which most easily beset literary men. On that side he multiplied his precautions, and set double watch. Hardly any writer of note has been so free from the petty jealousies, and morbid irritabilities, of our caste. But I do not think that he kept himself equally pure from the faults of a very different kind, from the faults of a man of the world. In politics, a bitter and unscrupulous partisan; profuse and ostentatious in expense; agitated by the hopes and fears of a gambler; perpetually sacrificing the perfection of his compositions, and the durability of his fame, to his eagerness for money; writing with the slovenly haste of Dryden, in order to satisfy wants which were not, like those of Dryden, caused by circumstances beyond his control, but which were produced by his extravagant waste or rapacious speculation; this is the way in which he appears to me. I am sorry for it, for I sincerely admire the greater part of his works; but I cannot think him a high-minded man, or a man of very strict principle.

  No sounder piece of British manhood was put together in that eighteenth century of time. Alas! his fine Scotch face, with its shaggy honesty, sagacity and goodness, when we saw it latterly on the Edinburgh streets, was all worn with care, the joy all fled from it; ploughed deep with labour and sorrow. We shall never forget it; we shall never see it again. Adieu, Sir Walter, pride of all Scotchmen, take our proud and sad farewell.

  I have, somewhere else, expressed how greatly the landlords of Scotland are indebted to Scott. It is to him that thousands of them owe not merely subsistence, but ample fortunes. In every part of the country where he has touched the earth with his magic wand, roads have run along the heretofore impassable morass, rocks have given way for men, and houses have sprung up full of the necessary “entertainment for man and horse.” Steamers convey troops of summer tourists to the farthest west and north of the Scottish coast; and every lake and mountain swarms with them. On arriving at Melrose, I was greatly struck with the growth of this traffic of picturesque and romantic travel. It was twenty years since I was in that village before. Scott was then living at Abbotsford, and drew up to the inn door to take post-horses on to Kelso. While these were got out, we had a full and fair view of him as he sat, without his hat, in the carriage reading, as we ourselves were breakfasting near the window of a room just opposite. Then, there was one small inn in the place, and very few people in it; now, there were two or three; and these, beside lodging-houses, all crammed full of guests. The inn-yards stood full of traveling carriages, and servants in livery were lounging about in motley throngs. The ruins of the abbey were like a fair for people, and the intelligent and very obliging woman who shows them said, that every year the numbers increased, and, that every year, foreigners seemed to arrive from more and more distant regions. At Abbotsford it was the same.

  Abbotsford, a supremely melancholy place heretofore, will be henceforth more melancholy still. Those associations of ruined hopes and blighted prospects which cling to its picturesque beauty will now be more numerous and more striking than ever. The writings of Scott are the true monuments of his genius; while Abbotsford, on which he rested so much, will form for the future a memorial equally significant of his foibles and his misfortunes,—of bright prospects suddenly overcast, and sanguine hopes quenched in the grave forever.

  Think of your pleasure when you read that “Ivanhoe” which was dictated in the intervals of agonizing cramp-spasms; “Bonaparte” and the “Chronicles of the Canongate,” composed amid the ruins of his fortune; “Woodstock,” composed while his wife was perishing in an adjoining room; the “Tales,” that were written for a darling and dying grandchild, and whatever else followed amid broken health, lost riches, with the dim eyes and trembling fingers and the lone heart of old age, to pay vast debts which he had not contracted, but to which his high sense of honour and his duty as a gentleman compelled him. Truly, for him, noblesse oblige was not an empty word.

  No one who knew Sir Walter, will fail to remember his admirable convivial powers, or the quaint good humour, utterly sans pretension, by which these were animated. No sooner had he taken his place at table than by some naïf remark, not addressed to any one in particular, he usually effected the utter demolition of “starch,” and, without having once in all his life ever aimed at saying a “good thing,” produced more mirth and joviality than any professional wit or punster ever could. He was so decided an enemy to “starch,” or pretension of any kind, that it became invariably decomposed in his presence, and he cared not of what platitudes or “merry-andrada’s” he served himself to effect that purpose.

  I never saw any man who looked the man of genius he was, but Professor Wilson. Next to him was Sir Walter Scott. Him I first saw, in his fifty-seventh year, when I was at college in Edinburgh, and had wandered one day, in, I think, the month of June, into one of the law courts to hear Mr. Jeffrey plead…. I had been standing for some time in the Court of Session, in which Sir Walter Scott was one of the principal clerks, who sate at a table below the judges, when my eye fell upon an elderly man, one of those sitting at the table, wearing a rusty-looking old stuff gown. His chin rested on his left hand, and his right hung by his side with a pen in it. Without having an idea who he was, my attention was soon arrested by his lofty forehead, and a pair of eyes that seemed gazing dreamily into a distant world unseen by any one but himself. The more I looked at those eyes, the more remarkable appeared their character and expression: not bright, or penetrating, but invested with a grand, rapt, profound air. He sate motionless as a statue, apparently lost to all that was passing around him. A sudden suspicion arose within me, that I was looking on the mighty Northern novelist, who had publicly avowed himself the author of Waverley in the preceding February. To make assurance doubly sure, I asked a person standing beside me, who that was, indicating him. “Whaur d’ye come frae?” said he, looking at me rather contemptuously; “d’ye no ken that’s Sir Walter?” Almost while this was being said, Sir Walter seemed to rouse himself from a reverie, and soon afterwards wrote rapidly on several sheets of paper, and then quitted the court, leaning on his stick, and walking very lame.

  We were not long in reaching Abbotsford. The house, which is more compact, and of considerably less extent than I anticipated, stands in full view from the road, and at only a short distance from it, lower down towards the river. Its aspect disappointed me; but so does everything. It is but a villa, after all; no castle, nor even a large manor-house, and very unsatisfactory when you consider it in that light. Indeed, it impressed me, not as a real house, intended for the home of human beings,—a house to die in or to be born in,—but as a plaything,—something in the same category as Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill. The present owner seems to have found it insufficient for the actual purposes of life; for he is adding a wing, which promises to be as extensive as the original structure…. On the whole, there is no simple and great impression left by Abbotsford; and I felt angry and dissatisfied with myself for not feeling something which I did not and could not feel. But it is just like going to a museum, if you look into particulars; and one learns from it, too, that Scott could not have been really a wise man, nor an earnest one, nor one that grasped the truth of life; he did but play, and the play grew very sad towards its close. In a certain way, however, I understand his romances the better for having seen his house; and his house the better for having read his romances. They throw light on one another.

  He the first gentleman of Europe (George IV)! There is no stronger satire on the proud English society of that day than that they admire George. No thank God, we can tell of better gentlemen…. I will take men of my own profession of letters. I will take Walter Scott, who loved the king, and who was his sword and buckler, and championed him like that brave highlander in his own story, who fights round his craven chief. What a good gentleman! What a friendly soul, what a generous hand, what an amiable life, was that of the noble Sir Walter!

  Few persons who heard him speak could have doubted Scott’s nationality; it could not have been said with justice that Scott “Hung on the soft phrase of Southern tongue.” His accent, on the contrary, was so broad that Mr. Harness said he sometimes could not understand him without difficulty. One day when they had been talking of “Lucia di Lammermoor,” which had lately appeared, he changed the subject by observing, “Weel! I think we’ve a’most had enow of that chiel.”

  His traveling costume [in 1825] … consisted of a green cut-away coat, or rather jacket, with short skirts and brass buttons; drab trousers, vest, and gaiters; a single seal and watch-key, attached to a watered black ribbon, dangling from his fob; a loose, and not very stiff, linen collar; a black silk neck-kerchief; and a low-crowned, deep-brimmed hat. He had no gloves; and his ungloved hands, large and almost clumsy, were thickly covered with red bristles. His feet were scarcely so large as one would have expected, his height being six feet. He was muscular, but not stout; and the breadth across his chest was very great. He walked very lame, using a stout staff, with a crooked handle, even in the room; but he was active and rapid in his movements. As he stood,—just as Maclise drew him in the Fraserian sketch,—only the toes and ball of his right foot touched the ground. It appeared as if the posterior tendons had shrunk; at any rate, his heel was raised when he stood.

  Lockhart has cleverly left an impression on his readers that Scott was first a victim to the foolish schemes of these two brothers, and then of the sanguine follies of Constable, the publisher. Whereas, in truth, no sharper or keener Scotsman ever lived than the great novelist himself, nor had ever any man more trusty allies than had Scott in Constable and the Ballantynes.

  Generous, large-hearted and magnanimous as Scott was, there was something in the days of his prosperity that fell short of what men need for their highest ideal of a strong man.

  I remember him about that time [1821]: he used to walk up and down Princes Street, as we boys were coming from the High School, generally with some friend, and every now and then he stopped, and resting his lame leg against his stick, laughed right out at some joke of his friend’s or his own: he said a good laugh was worth standing for, and besides required it for its completion. How we rejoiced when we took off our bonnets, to get a smile and a nod from him, thinking him as great as Julius Cæsar or Philopœmen, Hector or Agricola, any day.

  The great charm of his conversation, being a man of such eminence, was its perfect simplicity, and the entire absence of vanity and love of display.

  I will endeavour briefly to give some idea of the impression he made on me, in this the only interview [1819], I ever had with him. He looked like a country gentleman, florid and healthy; his countenance was of a good-natured and open character, the brow very fine, and strongly marked, the eye particularly clear and bright; altogether he was a man with whom I should not have been in the least afraid to converse, had I met him in a less crowded circle.

  Passing Storr’s Hall, the mind wandered back to the meeting there of Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, Christopher North, and greater than all, our own Walter Scott; and surely not in all the earth could a fitter spot than this have been found for their gathering. How much the world of to-day owes to the few names who spent days together here! Not often can you say of one little house, “Here had we our country’s honor roofed” to so great an extent as it would be quite allowable to say in this instance. But behold the vanity of human aspirations! If there was one wish dearer than another to the greatest of these men, it was that Abbotsford should remain from generation to generation the home of his race. This very hour, while sailing on the lake, a newspaper was handed to me, and my eye caught the advertisement, “Abbotsford to let,” followed by the stereotyped description, so many reception-rooms, nursery, outbuildings, and offices, suitable for a gentleman’s establishment. Shade of the mighty Wizard of the North, has it come to this! Oh, the pity of it! the pity of it! Well for your fame that you built for mankind other than this stately home of your pride. It will crumble and pass utterly away long before the humble cot of Jeannie Deans shall fade from the memory of man. The time will come when the largest son of time, who wandering sang to a listening world, shall be as much forgot

	“As the canoe that crossed a lonely lake
	A thousand years ago.”

But even the New Zealander who stands on the ruins of London Bridge will know something of Walter Scott if he knows much worth knowing. “Abbotsford to let!” This to come to us just as we were passing one of the haunts of Scott, than whom no greater Scott ever lived save one. Fortunately no such blow is possible for the memory of Burns.

  Sir,—In your biography it is recorded that you not only won the favour of all men and women; but that a domestic fowl conceived an affection for you, and that a pig, by his will, had never been severed from your company. If some Circe had repeated in my case her favourite miracle of turning mortals into swine, and had given me a choice, into that fortunate pig, blessed among his race, would I have been converted! You, almost alone among men of letters, still, like a living friend, win and charm us out of the past; and if one might call up a poet, as the scholiast tried to call Homer, from the shades, who would not, out of all the rest, demand some hours of your society? Who that ever meddled with letters, what child of the irritable race, possessed even a tithe of your simple manliness, of the heart that never knew a touch of jealousy, that envied no man his laurels, that took honour and wealth as they came, but never would have deplored them had you missed both and remained but the Border sportsman and the Border antiquary?

  Scott’s library still remains at Abbotsford, and no one who has ever entered that embodiment of the great man’s soul can ever forget it. The library, with the entire contents of the house, were restored to Scott in 1830 by his trustees and creditors, “As the best means the creditors have of expressing their very high sense of his most honourable conduct, and in grateful acknowledgment of the unparalleled and most successful exertions he has made, and continues to make for them.” The library is rich in the subjects which the great author loved, such as Demonology and Witchcraft.

  “Alan Fairford,” “The Ariosto of the North,” “A Bard of Martial Lay,” “The Black Hussar of Literature,” “The Border Minstrel,” “A Borderer Between Two Ages,” “The Caledonian Comet,” “The Charmer of the World,” “Colonel Grogg,” “The Duke of Darnick,” “Duns Scotus,” “The Great Border Minstrel,” “The Great Magician,” “The Great Minstrel,” “The Great Unknown,” “A Homer of a Poet,” “The Mighty Minstrel,” “The Minstrel of the Border,” “Our Northern Homer,” “Old Peveril,” “Peveril of the Peak,” “The Proudest Boast of the Caledonian Muse,” “Sir Tristram,” “The Superlative of My Comparative,” “The Wizard of the North.”

  It seems strange that the great-souled, great-brained author of “Waverley,” whose heart was as large as his head was high, should have placed a commemoration stone over the grave of “Helen Walker, the humble individual who practised in real life the virtues with which fiction has invested the imaginary character of Jeanie Deans,” and should have neglected entirely the spot where the authors of his own being were laid.

  While nothing can be found now to alter men’s conception of Scott, any book about him is justified, even if it do no more than heap up superfluous testimony to the beauty of his character.

  According to the distribution of Scott’s brain as indicated by the outside, he should have been a conceited religious fanatic; but he was neither conceited, nor fanatical, nor over-religious. The head suggests by its height, or rather by its retreating length and narrowness, artificial compression,—not wholly a wrong suggestion for it was by compression that its peculiar shape was produced. The matter is of intense interest when we realize that only a freak of nature prevented that matchless brain from being locked within an inclosure which would have made it that of a microcephalous idiot…. When Dr. Charles Creighton once happened to show to a distinguished French anthropologist a skull of one of this unfortunate class, with its boat-shape formation and effaced sagittal suture, the savant held it up and exclaimed, “Voilà, Walter Scott!” Had this defect in bone-making extended to the other sutures, there would have been no Sir Walter Scott, no increase of horse-hire in the Trosachs, no Scotland of romance, and no Waverleys for the world…. The point of these suggestions is that vast and splendid as were Scott’s gifts and achievements, he is still entitled to allowance for what Nature intended but failed to do for him through her own fault.

  Sir Walter’s daughter, Sophia, married John Lockhart, the historian. They had three children, the youngest of whom, Charlotte, married James Hope, Esq., who by act of Parliament took the name of Hope-Scott. They also had three children, the eldest of whom, Mary Monica, my hostess, was sole heiress of Abbotsford and other large estates, the other two children having died. In 1874 she married the Hon. Joseph Maxwell, a younger brother of Lord Herries, of Everingham Park, whose title and estates he will inherit, as Lord Herries has no son. Mr. Maxwell also legally took the name of Maxwell-Scott, and the first child born was named Walter Scott. Upon this auspicious occasion the Queen telegraphed with her congratulations, “He shall be knighted ‘Sir Walter’ when he is twenty-one.” This boy is now nineteen years of age, and has six rollicksome brothers and sisters. Walter is destined for the army, Malcomb for the navy. Then follow Josephine, seventeen years old; Alice, twelve; Michael, ten; Margaret, seven; and Herbert, two.

  Scott’s character was, in nearly every respect, one of the manliest on record. If he had lived in the times of chivalry he so dearly loved to portray, he would have worn his lady’s glove in his casque and couched his lance with the bravest, seeking by deeds of prowess to distinguish himself and gain her love, after the manner of the days gone by…. Add to this, that in anything that affected the deeper feelings of the heart, in his tender feelings towards those near and dear to him, we have it from Lockhart, that Scott had all the sensitiveness of a maiden. Such modesty and sensitiveness, carried to excess, render a man but an indifferent wooer.

  By this time [1791] he had also become qualified for ladies’ society. He had grown to be tall and strong; his figure was both powerful and graceful; his chest and arms were those of a Hercules. Though his features were not handsome, their expression was singularly varied and pleasing; his eye was bright and his complexion brilliant. It was a proud day, he said, when he found that a pretty young woman would sit out and talk to him for hours in a ballroom, where his lameness prevented him from dancing. This pretty young lady was probably Williamina, daughter of Sir John and Lady Jane Belsches, afterwards Stuart of Fettercairn near Montrose, born October 1776. She ultimately married, on 19 Jan. 1797, Sir William Forbes, bart., of Pitsligo, was mother of James David Forbes, and died 5 Dec. 1810. Scott appears to have felt for her the strongest passion of his life. Scott’s father, says Lockhart, thought it right to give notice to the lady’s father of the attachment. This interference, however, produced no effect upon the relations between the young people. Scott, he adds, hoped for success for “several long years.” Whatever the true story of the failure, there can be no doubt that Scott was profoundly moved, and the memory of the lady inspired him when describing Matilda in “Rokeby,” and probably other heroines. He refers to the passion more than once in his last journal, and he had affecting interviews with her mother in 1827.

  It was a cruel disenchantment—a most crushing blow. He left her father’s house, and wandered away into a country solitude, to battle with the anguish which during two long years he was unable to quell, and which, in fact, endured more or less to the very end of his life. He said in reference to it, as we have quoted, that “the dead will feel no pain;” but still, the secret agony they have known in life ought to be sacred to us now.

  The great luminary, whose magic hand had made the spell of Scottish romance potent all over Europe, was wedded to the older views. Scott was indeed no adept in political science. His opinions were not those of any party, but exclusively his own. They were coloured by the poetry of his nature, and, while they had something of the free-lance which it was his nature to be, their very intensity of conviction, and their loyalty to old, and above all to national, traditions, gave them a halo of chivalry which puzzled and perplexed the lesser men around him. The very tenacity of his friendships, and his loyalty to the names of the past, made smaller men criticise and carp at that which they did not understand. His geniality and breadth of character prevented him from feeling any very strong sympathy with the enthusiasm of religious feeling that seemed to swathe human morality in the swaddling bands of a somewhat unctuous and obtrusive code of religious ethics.

Poetry

  The muse of Scott lives only in reminiscences of the old songs of Scotland; his verse is, as it were, a mosaic composed of detached fragments of romantic legend and early chivalry adapted to Scottish customs, and knit together with wondrous skill and care: just as fragmentary portions of paintings on glass out of Gothic churches are sometimes found in country houses and hermitages at the present day, neatly cemented together for the sake of picturesque effect.

  No writer of modern times has combined so much power of imagination with such shrewdness in the observation of human character, and so much of the painter’s eye in his delineation of outward objects, more particularly as regards the dresses, armour, furniture, and other decorations of past ages, insomuch that he is apt to dwell on these to the prejudice of what is more important to the general effect of his story.

  Compared with true and great poets, our Scottish minstrel is but a “metre ballad-monger.” We would rather have written one song of Burns, or a single passage in Lord Byron’s “Heaven and Earth,” or one of Wordsworth’s “fancies and good-nights,” than all his epics…. He is a mere narrative and descriptive poet, garrulous of the old time. The definition of his poetry is a pleasing superficiality.

Great Minstrel of the Border!

  Scott is a poet truly natural and heroic: he finds his scenes in his native land, and his heroes and heroines in British history and tradition. There is an astonishing ease, vehemence, and brightness in his verse; his poems are a succession of historical figures, with all the well-defined proportions of statues—with this difference, that they act and speak according to the will of the poet…. No one since the days of Homer has sung with such an impetuous and burning breath the muster, the march, the onset, and all the fiery vicissitudes of battle.

  To Scott, alone, of all the poets of his time, belongs the merit of comprehension. Although his works could hardly have been written in any other period than the nineteenth century, they still are remarkably free from its egotism. No writer since Shakspeare has displayed such power in the creation and delineation of character, or such freedom from idiosyncrasies and personal prejudices, in describing life and manners.

  What did Walter Scott write without stint? a rhymed traveller’s guide to Scotland. And the libraries of verses they print have this Birmingham character. How many volumes of well-bred metre we must jingle through, before we can be filled, taught, renewed!

  The poetic style of Scott is—(it becomes necessary to say so when it is proposed to “translate Homer into the melodies of Marmion”)—it is, tried by the highest standards, a bastard epic style; and that is why, out of his own powerful hands, it has had so little success. It is a less natural, and therefore a less good style, than the original ballad-style; while it shares with the ballad-style the inherent incapacity of rising into the grand style, of adequately rendering Homer.

  He was a poet only at rare intervals.

  No other metrical narrative in our language seem to me to possess an equal power of enchaining the attention of the reader, and carrying him on from incident to incident with such entire freedom from weariness.

  Walter Scott’s verse is not to be sung or danced—it is to be jumped.

  No poet, and in this he carries on the old Scotch quality, is a finer colourist. His landscapes are painted in colour, and the colour is always true. Nearly all his natural description is Scotch, and he was the first who opened to the delight of the world the wild scenery of the Highlands and the Lowland moorland. He touched it all with a pencil so light, graceful, and true, that the very names are made romantic.

  Scott has always been the poet of youthful and high-hearted readers: there seems to be no reason why he should not continue indefinitely to meet their requirements, and certainly they will be considerable losers if ever, in the lapse of time and shifting of poetic models, his compositions should pass out of ready currency. He is not, and never can be, the poet of literary readers: the student and the artist remember him as a cherished enchantment of their youth, and do not recur to him. Neither the inner recesses of thought nor the high places of art thrill to his appeal. But it is highly possible for the critical tendency and estimate to be too exclusively literary; the poetry of Scott is mainly amenable to a different sort of test, and to that it responds not only adequately but triumphantly.

  Scott’s is almost the only poetry in the English language that not only runs in the head of average men, but heats the head in which it runs by the mere force of its hurried frankness of style…. No poet ever equalled Scott in the description of wild and simple scenes and the expression of wild and simple feelings.

  Of all the poets of his time, Scott was the one who set least store by style. He worked always rapidly, often carelessly, writing whole pages, I might almost say, cantos, which do not rise above ballad ding-dong. And yet when he put forth his full strength, on a subject which really kindled him, he could rise to a dignity and elevation, truly impressive. Though the facility of the octosyllabic couplet often betrayed him into carelessness, yet there are many passages, in which he has made it the best vehicle we possess for rapid and effective narrative—perhaps also for natural description.

  Of all the names that adorn the opening of our century Scott’s must be pronounced upon the whole the greatest—at once the manliest and the most original and creative. He may rank below Wordsworth and Coleridge as a poet, although he is great in poetic qualities as old as Homer, in which both are entirely wanting; but take him all in all there is no intellectual figure comparable to him in breadth and richness. He strikes the new note of the century—its larger intelligence both for nature and life—its deeper insight into the past, as well as its freer, fuller, and clearer eye for the present, with a wider, a more extended and powerful sweep than any other.

  His poetry is the poetry of action. In imaginative power he ranks below no other poet, except Homer and Shakespeare. He delighted in war, in its movement, its pageantry, and its events; and, though lame, he was quartermaster of a volunteer corps of cavalry.

  What Deus ex machina could have come to my aid more effective than the sunny cheerfulness, strong, healthy vitality, Catholic human sympathy, deep-rooted patriotism, fine pictorial eye, and rare historic furniture of Walter Scott? To the poetry of this greatest literary Scot, whom I soon learned to associate in æsthetical bonds with the sunny sobriety of Homer and the great Greeks, I owe in no small measure that close connection with the topography and the local history of my country which appears in my poetical productions, and which, if these are destined in any smallest degree to live in the memory of my countrymen, will be the element that has most largely contributed to their vitality.

  I should be ungrateful, indeed, if I did not speak of the obligation we all were under to Scott’s poems. I cannot recall the time when I could not repeat long passages of them from memory, and I may say that those passages have often been a great comfort to me since, when I have been imprisoned in my berth on an ocean steamer. Whatever else criticism may say of Scott, he is certainly the poet of boyhood and early youth. Of course, the poems led up to the novels, and by the time we were fourteen we had read all the best of them. But this is not my experience only, but that of the English-reading world.

  I got hold of Scott’s poems, too, in that cabin loft, and read most of the tales which were yet unknown to me after those earlier readings of my father’s. I could not say why “Harold the Dauntless” most took my fancy; the fine, strongly-flowing rhythm of the verse had a good deal to do with it, I believe. I liked these things, all of them, and in after years I liked the “Lady of the Lake” more and more, and from mere love of it got great lengths of it by heart; but I cannot say that Scott was then or ever a great passion with me.

  Yet it seems to me impossible, on any just theory of poetry or of literature, to rank him low as a poet. He can afford to take his trial under more than one statute. To those who say that all depends on the subject, or that the handling and arrangement of the subject are, if not everything, yet something to be ranked far above mere detached beauties, he can produce not merely the first long narrative poems in English, which for more than a century had honestly enthralled and fixed popular taste, but some of the very few long narrative poems which deserve to do so…. In his own special divisions of the simpler lyric and of lyrical narrative he sometimes attains the exquisite, and rarely sinks below a quality which is fitted to give the poetical delight to a very large number of by no means contemptible persons. It appears to me at least, that on no sound theory of poetical criticism can Scott be ranked as a poet below Byron, who was his imitator in narrative and his inferior in lyric. But it may be admitted that this was not the opinion of most contemporaries of the two, and that, much as the poetry of Byron has sunk in critical estimation during the last half century, and slight as are the signs of its recovery, those who do not think very highly of the poetry of the pupil do not, as a rule, show much greater enthusiasm for that of the master.

  His style was modelled at first chiefly on the Border ballads, and the word picturesque may perhaps best define it. The landscape is often rather touched-in by way of support to his figures than painted for its own sake or as the mere background of earlier days; human interests and passions, or those historical memories in which his soul delighted, in general, pervade it…. Scott, after Chaucer, is the one of all our non-dramatic poets who puts himself least forward; one of the few who thought little or nothing, personally, of themselves; the one who trusts most to letting his characters and scenes speak for themselves. By inevitable natural law he is indeed, of course, present in his work; but, like Homer, like Shakespeare, behind the curtain; latent in his own creation.

  Though Scott had neither Coleridge’s extraordinary musical faculty, nor his dreamy tenderness of sentiment, nor his gift of mystical imagination, there is a spirit and fire in his narrative verse, and a certain masterly breadth in his treatment of nature—as witness the noble opening to the “Lady of the Lake,” “The stag at eve had drunk his fill,” etc.—which must irresistibly challenge all those who scruple at bestowing the name of poetry on these splendid rhymed romances to enlarge their definitions.

  Of the features which distinguish the poetry of Scott none, perhaps, surpass in cogency or beauty that which a heraldic view displays. Scott is pre-eminently the poet of the blazoned shield. The influence of heraldry upon his verse is evident to the least observant—throughout, passages, some of exceeding brilliancy, occur with a frequency which renders this perception keenly susceptive. Of its significance none ever enjoyed an acuter perception, or of its occult grandeur a higher comprehension. His knowledge of the theme, as his poems evidence, was indeed recondite; its entire resources—origin, mission, tradition, and laws—were at command.

  Scott restored the Tale in Verse to literature. That achievement had an effect which far out-weighed and out-lasted his special manner, the limitations of which soon became obvious. The hot volley of short ringing lines, however telling in a recital of stirring adventure, was wanting in several qualities which had distinguished other schools of narrative verse. It was diffuse, without the leisured urbanity of Ariosto; plain, without the simplicity and reserve of Homer; old-fashioned, without the charming naïveté of Chaucer. Scott led the way back to romance, but his keen antiquarian taste was too much dominated by the bald manner of the medieval romancers, greatly as he surpassed them in all the dynamic qualities of story-telling. He had read the “Orlando” with delight; but on the whole the later and more splendid developments of romantic tale, whether in Italy or in England, lay beyond the range of his artistic susceptibility. The entire world of Greek letters was unknown to him. Chaucer he had naturally read; but there are curiously few signs that he loved him. Scott’s achievement was to tell a tale in the semi-lyric manner of a lay; Chaucer throughout his whole later career is occupied in effacing the characteristics of the lay from his narrative style.

Lay of the Last Minstrel, 1805

  I have been very much delighted lately in reading Walter Scott’s “Lay of the Last Minstrel.” I hope you have some assistance from him, if he condescends to write songs. He has the true spirit of a poet in him, and long may he flourish.

  I began last night to read Walter Scott’s “Lay of the Last Minstrel,” as part of my evening readings to my children. I was extremely delighted by the poetical beauty of some passages, the Abbey of Melrose for example, and most of the prologues to the Cantos. The costume, too, is admirable. The tone is antique; and it might be read for instruction as a picture of the manners of the middle ages. Many parts are, however, tedious; and no care has been employed to make the story interesting.

  The author, enamoured of the lofty visions of chivalry, and partial to the strains in which they were formerly embodied, seems to have employed all the resources of his genius in endeavouring to recall them to the favour and admiration of the public; and in adapting to the taste of modern readers a species of poetry which was once the delight of the courtly, but has long ceased to gladden any other eyes than those of the scholar and the antiquary. This is a romance, therefore, composed by a minstrel of the present day; or such a romance as we may suppose would have been written in modern times, if that style of composition had continued to be cultivated, and partaken consequently of the improvements which every branch of literature has received since the time of its desertion.

  It would be great affectation not to own frankly, that the Author expected some success from “The Lay of the Last Minstrel.” The attempt to return to a more simple and natural style of poetry was likely to be welcomed, at a time when the public had become tired of heroic hexameters, with all the buckram and binding which belong to them of later days. But whatever might have been his expectations, whether moderate or unreasonable, the result left them far behind, for among those who smiled on the adventurous Minstrel were numbered the great names of William Pitt and Charles Fox. Neither was the extent of the sale inferior to the character of the judges who received the poem with approbation. Upwards of thirty thousand copies of the Lay were disposed of by the trade; and the Author had to perform a task difficult to human vanity, when called upon to make the necessary deductions from his own merits, in a calm attempt to account for his popularity.

  The truth is that the supernatural element, so far from being an excrescence, overhangs, encompasses, and interpenetrates the human element in the story…. We may, if we please, call this supernatural machinery grotesque, or childish, or ridiculous, but it is absurd to speak of it as an excrescence, or otherwise than thoroughly transfused with the human interest of the story. Only a born romancer, in full imaginative sympathy with such childish or childlike superstitions, could have effected so complete a transfusion.

  As regards the mere telling of a tale, Scott has no equal in English literature. His power of invention and expression was extraordinary. The interest of the story is carried on in remarkably well-sustained fashion, considering the length of the poem. Scott had no power of analysing character. His character-drawing is done in a dashing scene-painting manner, with bold, broad outlines, but no subtle delineation. This is extremely suitable to the style of poem and acts as a positive help to the course of the narrative. In none of his poems does the story move more vigorously onward than in his first—“The Lay of the Last Minstrel.”

Marmion, 1808

	Next view in state, proud prancing on his roan,
	The golden-crested haughty Marmion,
	Now forging scrolls, now foremost in the fight,
	Not quite a Felon, yet but half a Knight,
	The gibbet or the field prepared to grace;
	A mighty mixture of the great and base.
	And think’st thou, Scott! by vain conceit perchance,
	On public taste to foist thy stale romance,
	Though Murray with his Miller may combine
	To yield thy muse just half-a-crown per line?
	No! when the sons of song descend to trade,
	Their Bays are sear, their former laurels fade.
	Let such forego the poet’s sacred name,
	Who rack their brains for lucre, not for fame.
	Still for stern Mammon may they toil in vain!
	And sadly gaze on gold they cannot gain!
	Such be their meed, such still the just reward
	Of prostituted muse and hireling bard!
	For this we spurn Apollo’s venal son,
	And bid a long “good night to Marmion.”

  His modes of life, his personal feelings, are no where so detailed as in the epistles prefixed to the cantos of “Marmion.” These bring us close to his side, and leading us with him through the rural and romantic scenes he loved, talk with us by the way of all the rich associations of which he was master. His dogs are with him; he surveys these dumb friends with the eye of a sportsman and a philosopher, and omits nothing in the description of them which could interest either. An old castle frowns upon the road; he bids its story live before you with all the animation of a drama and the fidelity of a chronicle. Are topics of the day introduced? He states his opinions with firmness and composure, expresses his admiration with energy, and, where he dissents from those he addresses, does so with unaffected candor and cordial benignity. Good and great man!

  “Marmion” is the greatest of his poems, while the “Lay” is the freshest….

  Judge Scott’s poetry by whatever test you will—whether it be a test of that which is peculiar to it, its glow of national feeling, its martial ardour, its swift and rugged simplicity, or whether it be a test of that which is common to it with most other poetry, its attraction for all romantic excitements, its special feeling for the pomp and circumstance of war, its love of light and colour—and tested either way, “Marmion” will remain his finest poem.

  Skilfully as the character of Marmion has been constructed, the reader cannot help feeling that it has been put together; hence we never quite breathe in the story, as we do in the “Iliad” or the “Odyssey,” the ideal atmosphere which is produced by the perfection of metrical writing. Prose alone could secure the large and unfettered liberty that historical romance requires: when Scott employs his magic powers to clothe the spirit of the Past in the language of real life the verisimilitude of his creation is complete.

  The narrative is powerful, rapid, and absorbing. There is a good deal that is second rate, parts even that are quite common-place; but there are more passages and longer passages of high merit than are to be found anywhere else in Scott’s poetry. The canto on Flodden has been called “the finest battle-piece since Homer,” and probably deserves the praise. “There are few men,” it has been said, “who have not at some time or other thought the worse of themselves that they are not soldiers;” and no one perhaps of all who have shared this feeling has read the last canto of “Marmion” without a quickened pulse and a heightened colour. The “hurried frankness” is here exactly suited to the subject, and it rises in dignity with the greatness of the theme.

Lady of the Lake, 1810

  I see the “Lady of the Lake” advertised. Of course it is in his old ballad style, and pretty. After all, Scott is the best of them. The end of all scribblement is to amuse, and he certainly succeeds there.

  He says Walter Scott is going to publish a new poem; I do not augur well of the title, “The Lady of the Lake.” I hope this lady will not disgrace him…. By great good fortune, and by the good-nature of Lady Charlotte Rawdon, we had “The Lady of the Lake” to read just when the O’Beirnes were with us. A most delightful reading we had; my father, the Bishop, and Mr. Jephson reading it aloud alternately. It is a charming poem: a most interesting story, generous, finely-drawn characters, and in many parts the finest poetry. But for an old prepossession—an unconquerable prepossession—in favour of the old minstrel, I think I should prefer this to either the “Lay” or “Marmion.” Our pleasure in reading it was increased by the sympathy and enthusiasm of the guests.

  With regard to diction and imagery, it is quite obvious that Mr. Scott has not aimed at writing either in a very pure or a very consistent style. He seems to have been anxious only to strike, and to be easily and universally understood; and, for this purpose, to have culled the most glittering and conspicuous expressions of the most popular authors, and to have interwoven them in splendid confusion with his own nervous diction and irregular versification. Indifferent whether he coins or borrows, and drawing with equal freedom on his memory and his imagination, he goes boldly forward, in full reliance on a never-failing abundance; and dazzles, with his richness and variety, even those who are most apt to be offended with his glare and irregularity.

  The “Lady of the Lake” was the first revelation to the world of the lovely scenery and the poetry of clan life which lay enclasped and unknown to the cultivated world in the Highlands.

  Walter Scott is out and away the king of the romantics. “The Lady of the Lake” has no indisputable claim to be a poem beyond the inherent fitness and desirability of the tale. It is just such a story as a man would make up for himself, walking, in the best health and temper, through just such scenes as it is laid in. Hence it is that a charm dwells undefinable among these slovenly verses, as the unseen cuckoo fills the mountains with his note; hence, even after we have flung the book aside, the scenery and adventures remain present to the mind, a new and green possession, not unworthy of that beautiful name, “The Lady of the Lake,” or that direct, romantic opening,—one of the most spirited and poetical in literature,—“The stag at eve had drunk his fill.”

Novels

  My dear Murray,—I have this moment finished the reading of 192 pages of our book—for ours it must be—and I cannot go to bed without telling you what is the strong and most favourable impression it has made upon me. If the remainder be at all equal, which it cannot fail to be from the genius displayed in what is now before me, we have been most fortunate indeed. The title is “The Tales of my Landlord; collected and reported by Jedediah Cleishbotham, Parish Clerk and Schoolmaster of Gandercleugh.” There cannot be a doubt as to the splendid merit of the work. It would never have done to have higgled and protested about seeing more volumes. I have now neither doubts nor fears, and I anxiously hope you will have as little. I am so happy at the fortunate termination of all my pains and anxieties, that I cannot be in bad humour with you for not writing me two lines in answer to my two last letters.

  The last series of those half novels, half romance things, called “Tales of My Landlord,” are dying off apace; but if their author gets money, he will not care about the rest; having never owned his work, no celebrity can be lost, nor no venture can injure him.

  The general name of these works, “the Scotch Novels,” will always indicate an era in our literary history, for they add a new species to the catalogue of our native literary productions, and nothing of the same nature has been produced anywhere else. They are as valuable as history and descriptive travels for the qualities which render these valuable; while they derive a bewitching animation from the soul of poetry, and captivate the attention by the interest of romantic story. As pictures of national manners they are inestimable; as views of human nature, influenced by local circumstances, they are extremely curious; as enthusiastic appeals to the passions and the imagination, they supply a strong stimulus to these faculties; and by running the course of the story through the most touching incidents, and within sight of the grandest events, they carry the reader’s sympathy perpetually with them.

  Scott is certainly the most wonderful writer of the day. His novels are a new literature in themselves, and his poetry as good as any—if not better (only on an erroneous system)—and only ceased to be so popular, because the vulgar learned were tired of hearing “Aristides called the Just,” and Scott the Best, and ostracised him. I like him, too, for his manliness of character, for the extreme pleasantness of his conversation, and his good nature towards myself, personally. May he prosper!—for he deserves it. I know no reading to which I fall with such alacrity as a work of W. Scott’s.

  It is no wonder that the public repay with lengthened applause and gratitude the pleasure they receive. He writes as fast as they can read, and he does not write himself down. He is always in the public eye, and we do not tire of him. His worst is better than any other person’s best. His back-grounds (and his later works are little else but back-grounds capitally made out)—are more attractive than the principal figures and most complicated actions of other writers. His works (taken together) are almost like a new edition of human nature. This is indeed to be an author!

  We should only read what we admire, as I did in my youth, and as I now experience with Sir Walter Scott. I have just begun “Rob Roy,” and will read his best novels in succession. All is great—material, import, characters, execution; and then what infinite diligence in the preparatory studies! what truth of detail in the execution! We see, too, what English history is; and what a thing it is when such an inheritance falls to the lot of a clever poet.

  Scott’s greatest glory, however, arises from the superior dignity to which he has raised the novel, not by its historic but its moral character, so that, instead of being obliged, as with Fielding’s and Smollett’s, to devour it, like Sancho Panza’s cheesecakes, in a corner as it were, it is now made to furnish a pure and delectable repast for all the members of the assembled family. In all his multifarious fictions, we remember no line, which in a moral point of view he might wish to blot. Fortunate man, who, possessed of power sufficient to affect the moral destinies of his age, has possessed also the inclination to give that power a uniformly beneficent direction! Who beside him, amid the brilliant display of genius, or the wildest frolics of wit and fancy, has never been led to compromise for a moment the interests of virtue?

  When I am very ill indeed, I can read Scott’s novels, and they are almost the only books I can then read. I cannot at such times read the Bible; my mind reflects on it, but I can’t bear the open page.

  If literature had no task but that of harmlessly amusing indolent, languid men, here was the very perfection of literature; that a man, here more emphatically than ever elsewhere, might fling himself back, exclaiming, “Be mine to lie on this sofa, and read everlasting Novels of Walter Scott!” The composition, slight as it often is, usually hangs together in some measure, and is a composition…. The sick heart will find no healing here, the darkly struggling heart no guidance: the Heroic that is in all men no divine awakening voice. We say, therefore, that they do not found themselves on deep interests, but on comparatively trivial ones, not on the perennial, perhaps not even on the lasting. In fact, much of the interest of these novels results from what may be called contrasts of costume. The phraseology, fashion of arms, of dress and life, belonging to one age, is brought suddenly, with singular vividness, before the eyes of another. A great effect this; yet by the very nature of it, an altogether temporary one. Consider, brethren, shall not we too one day be antiques, and grow to have as quaint a costume as the rest?

  We esteem the productions which the great novelist of Scotland has poured forth with startling speed from his rich treasury, not only as multiplying the sources of delight to thousands, but as shedding the most genial influences on the taste and feeling of the people.

  When I first arrived in Copenhagen, often walking about poor and forlorn, without sufficient money for a meal, I have spent the few pence I possessed to obtain from a library one of Walter Scott’s novels, and, reading it, forgot hunger and cold, and felt myself rich and happy.

  Two of Moore’s contemporaries must be placed above him in any fair estimate of the authors of the first part of the nineteenth century. Byron rose as a poet above all his rivals…. Scott is the other wonder of this age. Picturesque, interesting, and bard-like as are his narrative poems, the pathos, humour, description, character, and, above all, the marvellous fertility, displayed in the novels, show far greater power: a whole region of the territory of Imagination is occupied by this extraordinary man, alone and unapproachable…. The novels of Scott will furnish entertainment to many generations; nor is there likely to be any race of men so fastidious as to require anything purer, so spoilt by excitement as to need anything more amusing, or so grave as to scorn all delight from this kind of composition.

  On the whole, and speaking roughly, these defects in the delineation which Scott has given us of human life are but two. He omits to give us a delineation of the soul: we have mind, manners, animation, but it is the stir of this world. We miss the consecrating power; and we miss it not only in its own peculiar sphere,—which, from the difficulty of introducing the deepest elements into a novel, would have been scarcely matter for a harsh criticism,—but in the place in which a novelist might most be expected to delineate it. There are perhaps such things as the love affairs of immortal beings, but no one would learn it from Scott. His heroes and heroines are well dressed for this world, but not for another; there is nothing even in their love which is suitable for immortality. As has been noticed, Scott also omits any delineation of the abstract side of unworldly intellect. This too might not have been so severe a reproach, considering its undramatic, unanimated nature, if it had stood alone; but taken in connection with the omission which we have just spoken of, it is most important. As the union of sense and romance makes the world of Scott so characteristically agreeable—a fascinating picture of this world in the light in which we like best to dwell on it; so the deficiency in the attenuated, striving intellect, as well as in the supernatural soul, gives to the “world” of Scott the cumbrousness and temporality—in short, the materialism which is characteristic of the world.

  Scott’s veneration for the past reached its highest and most shrewd and intelligent form in his Scotticism. It is a coincidence with more than the usual amount of verbal good luck in it that his name should have been Scott—generically and comprehensively the Scotchman…. Scott is greatest in his Scotticism. It is as a painter of Scottish nature and Scottish life, an interpreter of Scottish beliefs and Scottish feelings, a narrator of Scottish history, that he attains to the height of his genius. He has Scotticized European literature. He has interested the world in the little land. It had been heard of before; it had given the world some reason to be interested in it before; with, at no time, more than a million and a half of souls in it, it had spoken and acted with some emphasis in relation to the bigger nations around it. But, since Scott, the Thistle, till then a wayside weed, has had a great promotion in universal botany, and blooms, less prickly than of yore, but the identical Thistle still, in all the gardens of the world. All round the globe the little land is famous; tourists flock to it to admire its scenery, while they shoot its game; and afar off, when the kilted regiment do British work, and the pibroch shrills them to the work they do, and men, marking what they do, ask whence they come, the answer is “From the land of Scott.”

  It had become a trite remark, long before there was the reason for it that now exists, that the Waverley Novels are, even from their mere popularity, the most striking phenomenon of the age. And that popularity, unequalled as it is in extent, is perhaps more extraordinary in its permanence. It has resisted the tendency of the public, and perhaps of ourselves, much as we struggle against it, to think every subsequent work of the same author inferior to its predecessor, if it be not manifestly superior. It has resisted the satiety which might have been predicted as the necessary consequence of the frequent repetition of similar characters and situations. Above all, it has withstood pessimum genus inimicorum laudantes.

  Indeed, what one novelist has been perfect in dialogue, making each person say just what he should and nothing else, but glorious Sir Walter?

  Scott’s canvas is more thickly and variously crowded; it is inexpressibly admirable both in quantity and in quality; but in our opinion it does not betoken a genius either so wide-embracing or so deep-piercing as that of the old poet whom the author of “Waverley” himself studied with such enthusiastic delight.

  His ease and great general power impressed me very strongly lately, when re-reading his Romances. In his unaffectedness and the apparent unconsciousness of strength he is unequalled. There are no more spasmodic efforts in him than in Fielding. In particular subjects, and on some points, he is perhaps excelled by other writers. Thus Mrs. Inchbald is more pathetic; Miss Austen deals more effectively with ordinary domestic matters; and the narrative of Alexander Dumas carries one on more buoyantly than that of Scott. The picture of Louis XI in Notre Dame is surely superior to the portrait of the same king in “Quentin Durward,” and Victor Hugo has originally more pathos and sometimes more force than Sir Walter. But I see in no other author such a combination of truth and ease and dramatic power.

  My boyhood was at a period when a branch of literature, till then underrated, and indeed little worth, suddenly assumed new character and proportions. One by one, the marvellous productions of the prince of novelists startled and charmed the British public. “Guy Mannering,” “The Antiquary,” “Rob Roy,” “Ivanhoe,” and all the rest,—what sunny memories, what hours of rapt enjoyment, do the very titles still call up!

  The great merit of Walter Scott’s novels is their generous and pure sentiment. There is a strain of generosity, manliness, truth, which runs through them all. They nowhere take for granted meanness; they always take for granted justice and honor.

  We have all known from our childhood as among the most hale and strengthening waters in which the young soul ever bathed. They discuss no moral problems, they place us in no relation towards our fellow that can be called moral at all, they belong to that part of us which is youthful, undebating, wholly unmoral—though not immoral,—they are simply always young, always healthy, always miraculous.

  People who died prior to the 7th of July, 1814, were unfortunate in one respect, if no other; for on that day was published the first of the “Waverley” romances. A world without Scott’s novels in it must have been rather a lean place to live in, surely; and we can never quite estimate the dullness and vacuity of a globe which existed before that immortal story-teller was born into it…. Walter Scott is indeed a literature in himself. His genius throws a lustre on the art of story-telling, and renders fiction a boon to the human race. His imagination had a range of eight centuries to unfold itself in, and he roamed through them with a masterful power and beauty. No good reader ever outgrows Sir Walter. Once take him in your heart, and there is no parting company with him after that.

  The greatest of all novelists if quality, quantity, and originality are taken together.

  I began to read Scott at about eleven, and I suppose that I have not read any of the Waverley novels since I was sixteen, but I seem to remember them all. That is a grand test of a really good book: that you should remember it.

  As for novels, I read all of Scott’s, the earlier in my early boyhood, the later as they appeared; and I have read them all twice over, some of them three or four times. They seem to me now as transcendent in their character-painting, in their dramatic power, and in the lifelikeness of their narrative, as when they were alone and unapproached.

  Never was there a more healthful and health-ministering literature than that which he gave to the world. To go back to it from Flaubert and Daudet and Tolstoi is like listening to the song of the lark after the shrieking passion of the midnight pianoforte;—nay, it is like coming out of the glare and heat and reeking vapor of a palace ball into a grove in the first light and music and breezes of the morning. It is not for nothing that so many thousands have felt toward Scott a deep personal gratitude, which few, if any other writers of English fiction have ever awakened. My own case is doubtless typical of thousands. In his novels I first came under the spell of genius in fiction, and in my reading of them the first happened to be what is usually called the least inspired—“The Monastery.” But no matter, I gave it three readings, end over end, and followed it with other novels from the same source as rapidly as my dear family Puritan authorities would permit, or as often as they could be evaded.

  One great charm of the Waverley Novels is the sound, healthy tone in them all. Scott regards mankind through his kindly, genial disposition. He never sneers, and there is neither mawkishness nor morbidness to be found in them. If they were not written with any exalted motive to reform society or make the world better, they have certainly given a world of pleasure to thousands of his fellowmen, and that is no small thing.

  In the beginning of any art even the most gifted worker must be crude in his methods, and we ought to keep this fact always in mind when we turn, say, from the purblind worshippers of Scott to Scott himself, and recognize that he often wrote a style cumbrous and diffuse; that he was tediously analytical where the modern novelist is dramatic, and evolved his characters by means of long-winded explanation and commentary; that, except in the case of his lower-class personages, he made them talk as seldom man and never woman talked; that he was tiresomely descriptive; that on the simplest occasions he went about half a mile to express a thought that could be uttered in ten paces across lots; and that he trusted his readers’ intuitions so little that he was apt to rub in his appeals to them. He was probably right; the generation which he wrote for was duller than this; slower-witted, æsthetically untrained, and in maturity not so apprehensive of an artistic intention as the children of to-day. All this is not saying Scott was not a great man; he was a great man, and a very great novelist as compared with the novelists who went before him. He can still amuse young people, but they ought to be instructed how false and how mistaken he often is, with his mediæval ideals, his blind Jacobitism, his intense devotion to aristocracy and royalty; his acquiescence in the division of men into noble and ignoble, patrician and plebeian, sovereign and subject, as if it were the law of God; for all which, indeed, he is not to blame as he would be if he were one of our contemporaries.

  Sound-hearted and true-souled Sir Walter speaks a language informed with robust health and fragrant of moral purity and sanity. We feel without going into biography that he has never deserted a wife or his children, or tried to upset the laws of marriage. He seems large, strong, safe, steadfast; and we like to have him near us. An influence like his never leaves a morbid heat in the nerve-centers, never suggests that hell has some advantages over Heaven as a high-toned summer resort. After reading “Ivanhoe” you may indulge some romantic desire for a spear, a shield, an armored horse, and plenty of muscle; but you breathe good air and feel clean.

  The steady demand for “Ivanhoe” and others of Scott’s novels proves their undying charm, and it appears to be a fact that the number of those who read Scott is increasing, while the number of the readers of Dickens is diminishing.

  It is late in the day, and it is no part of the purpose of this history, which reaches its goal with the publication of “Waverley,” to criticise Sir Walter. Let him be praised in words taken from Carlyle’s unworthy essay, wherein the name of “greatness” is refused to him because he had no express message to deliver. “Be this as it may, surely since Shakespeare’s time there has been no great speaker so unconscious of an aim in speaking as Walter Scott.” He saw life, and told the world what he saw. Has any writer since his time supplied it with a fuller, fairer vision? From Ivanhoe to Edie Ochiltree, from Lucy Ashton to Jeanie Deans, from the knightly achievements of the crusades to the humours of the Scottish peasantry,—this is the panorama he reveals, and he casts over it the light of his generous, gentle, and delicate nature. His very style, loose and rambling as it is, is a part of the man, and of the artistic effect he produces. The full vigour and ease with which his imagination plays on life is often suggested by his pleonasms and tautologies; the search for the single final epithet is no part of his method, for he delights in the telling, and is sorry when all is told.

  There is much clatter of arms in his stories, much hurrying from palace to heath, from heath to dungeon; but through it all reigns the same fixed calm of characters immutable in weakness or in strength.

  There are people who still read “Ivanhoe” and “The Talisman,” and profess to admire them, but such persons mostly belong to the fogey species…. Scott is superficial. His books may suit the careless reader “lying all day long on a sofa,” but they neither thrill the reader nor teach him anything new about life. They exhibit absolutely no psychological insight. They are nearly all clumsily written in a diffuse and disjointed style. Those which depend for success on their delineation of historical or quasi-historical events, are, for the most part, nothing better than “mediæval upholstery.” We may, therefore, fairly assume that we are anticipating the verdict of posterity in declaring that of the once-famous Waverley Novels only some three or four will be read at all in the twentieth century.

  Who will pretend that Walter Scott, splendid raconteur though he was, represented with even a remote degree of correctness the life of the Middle Ages?

  The perennial charm of the Waverley Novels resides very largely in their healthfulness. They take us entirely out of ourselves, and absorb us in the world of incident and action. If they are not always great as works of art, they are always great in that health of mind and soul which is elemental in all true living. Men cannot be too grateful for a mass of writing so genuine in tone, so free from morbid tendencies, so true to the fundamental ethics of living.

  The stories of Scott most likely to survive the centenary of their publication and to retain readers in the first quarter of the twentieth century are perhaps those in which he best withstands the comparison with Miss Edgeworth,—the stories in which he has recorded types of Scottish character, with its mingled humor and pathos. For mere excitement our liking is eternal: but the fashion thereof is fickle; and we prefer our romantic adventures cut this way to-day and another way to-morrow. Our interest in our fellow-man subsists unchanged forever; and we take a perennial delight in the revelation of the subtleties of human nature. It is in the “Antiquary” and in the “Heart of Midlothian” that Scott is seen at his best; and it is by creating characters like Caleb Balderstone and Dugald Dalgetty and Wandering Willie that he has deserved to endure.

  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…. All the romances of Alexander Dumas and Victor Hugo sprang directly from him; he had inspired Fouqué in Germany, Manzoni in Italy, and Fernan Caballero in Spain. Wherever historical fiction of a picturesque and chivalrous order was produced, it bore the stamp of Walter Scott upon its margin. Nor with the decline of the imitations is it found that the original ceases to retain its hold on the interest of the English race. Walter Scott, so long a European force, has now, foiled by the victory of the school of Balzac, retired once more to the home he came from, but on British soil there is as yet no sign of any diminution of his honour or popularity. Continental criticism is bewildered at our unshaken loyalty to a writer whose art can be easily demonstrated to be obsolete in many of its characteristics. But English readers confess the perennial attractiveness of a writer whose “tone” is the most perfect in our national literature, who has left not a phrase which is morbid or petulant or base, who is the very type of that generous freedom of spirit which we are pleased to identify with the character of an English gentleman. Into the persistent admiration of Sir Walter Scott there enters something of the militant imperialism of our race.

  Though Scott founded the historical novel, enunciated its most successful theory, and is, perhaps, still the greatest historical novelist, he is not the best exponent of his own theory. Attractive as is the theory of the romantic magnetization of history, overhanging it always is the shadow of the anger of the great god Verity. Scott was almost too ingrainedly honest for his theory. There are evidences of struggle when the Scotch lawyer becomes the romantic idealist in these historical novels. In truth, the novels never really desert fact; sometimes the story almost painfully and regretfully seems to cling to fact.

  The literary form under which Scott made the deepest impression upon the consciousness of his own generation and influenced most permanently the future literature of Europe, was prose fiction. As the creator of the historical novel and the ancestor of Kingsley, Ainsworth, Bulwer, and G. P. R. James; of Manzoni, Freytag, Hugo, Mérimée, Dumas, Alexis Tolstoi, and a host of others, at home and abroad, his example is potent yet. English fiction is directly or indirectly in his debt for “Romola,” “Hypatia,” “Henry Esmond,” and “The Cloister and the Hearth.” In several countries the historical novel had been trying for centuries to get itself born, but all its attempts had been abortive. “Waverley” is not only vastly superior to “Thaddeus of Warsaw” (1803) and “The Scottish Chiefs” (1809); it is something quite different in kind.

  Meanwhile, whether the novels are read or not, the novels continue to sell in endless editions. People who cannot read Shakespeare buy Shakespeare, and probably many persons who, very properly, buy Scott, cannot read him. I wish them the best of wishes,—may they have sons and daughters who can!

Waverley, 1814

  Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. It is not fair. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of the mouths of other people. I do not like him, and do not mean to like “Waverley” if I can help it, but fear I must.

  I think very highly of “Waverley,” and was inclined to suspect, in reading it, that it was written by Miss Scott, of Ancram.

  Have you read Walter Scott’s “Waverley?” I have ventured to say “Walter Scott’s;” though I hear he denies it, just as a young girl denies the imputation of a lover: but, if there be any belief in internal evidence, it must be his. It is his by a thousand indications,—by all the faults and all the beauties; by the unspeakable and unrecollectable names; by the vile pedantry of French, Latin, Gaelic, and Italian; by the hanging the clever hero, and marrying the stupid one; by the praise (well deserved certainly,—for when has Scotland ever such a friend?—but thrust in by his head and shoulders) of the late Lord Melville; by the sweet lyric poetry; by the perfect costume; by the excellent keeping of the picture; by the liveliness and gayety of the dialogues; and last, not least, by the entire and admirable individuality of every character in the book, high as well as low,—the life and soul which animates them all with a distinct existence, and brings them before our eyes like the portraits of Fielding and Cervantes.

  We have this moment finished “Waverley.” It was read aloud to this large family, and I wish the author could have witnessed the impression it made—the strong hold it seized of the feelings both of young and old—the admiration raised by the beautiful descriptions of nature—by the new and bold delineations of character—the perfect manner in which character is ever sustained in every change of situation from first to last, without effort, without the affectation of making the persons speak in character—the ingenuity with which each person introduced in the drama is made useful and necessary to the end—the admirable art with which the story is constructed and with which the author keeps his own secrets till the proper moment when they should be revealed, whilst in the meantime, with the skill of Shakspear, the mind is prepared by unseen degrees for all the changes of feeling and fortune, so that nothing, however extraordinary, shocks us as improbable: and the interest is kept up to the last moment. We were so possessed with the belief that the whole story and every character in it was real, that we could not endure the occasional addresses from the author to the reader. They are like Fielding: but for that reason we cannot bear them, we cannot bear that an author of such high powers, of such original genius, should for a moment stoop to imitation. This is the only thing we dislike, these are the only passages we wish omitted in the whole work: and let the unqualified manner in which I say this, and the very vehemence of my expression of this disapprobation, be a sure pledge to the author of the sincerity of all the admiration I feel for his genius.

  In my opinion it is the best novel that has been published these thirty years. The characters of Ebenezer Cruickshanks, mine host of the Garter, the Reverend Mr. Goukthrapple and Squire Bradwardine display a Cervantic vein of humour which has seldom been surpassed—whilst the descriptions of the gloomy caverns of the Highlands, and the delineations of the apathic Callum Beg and enterprising Vich Ian Vohr, show a richness of Scottean colouring which few have equalled.

  When you have finished the “Fair Maid of Perth,” you must at once read “Waverley,” which is indeed from quite a different point of view, but which may, without hesitation, be set beside the best works that have ever been written in this world. We see that it is the same man who wrote the “Fair Maid of Perth,” but that he has yet to gain the favour of the public, and therefore collects his forces so that he may not give a touch that is short of excellence. The “Fair Maid of Perth,” on the other hand, is from a freer pen; the author is now sure of his public, and he proceeds more at liberty. After reading “Waverley,” you will understand why Walter Scott still designates himself the author of that work; for there he showed what he could do, and he has never since written anything to surpass, or even equal, that first published novel.

  “Waverley” took two or three months to win public favour, and then a perfect furore set in. Sloop-load after sloop-load was sent off to the London market, and on the rumoured loss of one of these vessels, half London was in despair. The interest, too, excited by public curiosity as to the author’s name, was carefully fostered, and in a short time 12,000 copies were disposed of.

  The sudden burst into light and publicity of a gift which had been growing through all the changes of private life, of the wonderful stream of knowledge, recollection, divination, boundless acquaintance with and affection for human nature, which had gladdened the Edinburgh streets, the Musselburgh sands, the Southland moors and river-sides, since ever Walter Scott had begun to roam among them, with his cheerful band of friends, his good stories, his kind and gentle thoughts—was received by the world with a burst of delighted recognition to which we know no parallel. We do not know, alas! what happened when the audience in the Globe Theatre made a similar discovery. Perhaps the greater gift, by its very splendour, would be less easily perceived in the dazzling of a glory hitherto unknown, and obscured it may be by jealousies of actors and their inaptitude to do justice to the wonderful poetry put into their hands. But of that we know nothing. We know, however, that there were no two opinions about “Waverley.” It took the world by storm, which had had no such new sensation and no such delightful amusement for many a day. It was not only the beginning of a new and wonderful school in romance, a fresh chapter in literature, but the revelation of a region and a race unknown.

Guy Mannering, 1815

  We are satisfied that the time is not far distant, if it be not already arrived, when the best claim of “Guy Mannering” on the attention of its readers will be the line of the title-page, in which it is described as the work of the author of “Waverley.”

  Dandie Dinmont is, beyond all question, we think, the best rustic portrait that has ever yet been exhibited to the public—the most honourable to rustics, and the most creditable to the heart, as well as the genius of the artist—the truest to nature—the most interesting and the most complete in all its lineaments.—Meg Merrilees belongs more to the department of poetry. She is most akin to the witches of Macbeth, with some traits of the antient Sybil engrafted on the coarser stock of a Gipsy of the last century. Though not absolutely in nature, however, she must be allowed to be a very imposing and emphatic personage; and to be mingled, both with the business and the scenery of the piece, with the greatest possible skill and effect.—Pleydell is a harsh caricature; and Dirk Hatteric a vulgar bandit of the German school. The lovers, too, are rather more faultless and more insipid than usual,—and all the genteel persons, indeed, not a little fatiguing. Yet there are many passages of great merit, of a gentler and less obtrusive character.

  There is a wide difference of opinion with regard to the relative rank of Scott’s novels. Mr. Lowell once said that “The Bride of Lammermoor” was to him the most beautiful story in the language. Mr. Lang puts “Old Mortality” and “Quentin Durward” at the top of the list. But from any point of view, the popular instinct was not far astray in fastening upon “Ivanhoe” as, on the whole, the most widely acceptable of these great stories. “Kenilworth” is not far behind, but “Guy Mannering” falls below the middle of the list for the very good reason that while the first two have clear movement and cumulative dramatic interest, the latter is very defective as a story. The hero is a secondary personage.

The Antiquary, 1816

  It unites to a considerable degree the merits of “Waverley” with the faults of the “Astrologer;” and we have no hesitation in placing it, with the crowd of modern novels, below the former, and, with very few modern novels, above the latter.

  “The Antiquary” did not immediately rise into popularity (comparatively speaking), but, if we mistake not, it will stand the test of investigation with less danger from the captiousness of criticism, than almost any of its brethren.

  Perhaps of all his works, the one in which there is most of the current matter of his own mind.

  One of his most artistic works.

  As a novel of character, “The Antiquary” is the most remarkable of Scott’s productions. Nowhere is he a more faithful observer of the turns which differing personalities take, nowhere does he give a more living picture of human beings, and this he does without aid from incident. Given the story of “Old Mortality,” there are many novelists who could have written not “Old Mortality” indeed, but a good novel. A bad one, with the story of “The Antiquary,” almost any novelist but Scott would have written…. To read the book is not certainly to have the imagination greatly quickened, but to read it—to read of Edie, of Oldbuck and his household—is to see the plain everyday world as we should not otherwise see it, till circumstances and trouble had enlarged and softened our vision.

Old Mortality, 1816

  Murray told me that Sir Walter Scott, on being taxed by him as the author of “Old Mortality,” not only denied having written it, but added, “In order to convince you that I am not the author, I will review the book for you in the Quarterly,”—which he actually did, and Murray still has the MS. in his handwriting.

  Our evening’s reading now is “Old Mortality.” When I read that romance on its appearance, about thirty years ago, I thought it, and as it has lived in my memory I have ever since considered it, the grandest and best of all that admirable novelist’s works. My recurrence to it confirms the impression it then made on me.

  When Lord Holland, whose judgment in literary matters had great weight among a certain section of the British aristocracy, was asked his opinion of the new Scotch novel, he answered, “Opinion! we did not one of us go to bed last night: nothing slept but my gout.”

  Scott is the most chivalrous literary figure of this century, and the author with the widest range since Shakespeare. I think “Old Mortality” is his greatest novel.

  Ranking foremost among the Waverley novels for variety of character sketches, stirring incidents, and infinite humour, affords also an accurate picture of the disorders and abuses under which the Scottish people suffered during the reign of the last Stuarts…. Lord Evandale is probably the favourite with all young readers. There is an ardour and dashing gallantry about him which, combined with his unhappy fate, renders him peculiarly attractive, while Morton’s restrained and serious nature wins on us more slowly, and it is not until the close of the story that we fully realise his historic qualities.

  Had I to choose my private favorite, it would be “Old Mortality.”

  The novel which goes by the title of “Old Mortality” may or may not be Scott’s masterpiece, but on the whole it is perhaps the one, which, if a plebiscite of literary opinion were taken, would obtain the largest following.

Rob Roy, 1818

  This is not so good, perhaps, as some others of the family;—but it is better than any thing else; and has a charm and a spirit about it that draws us irresistibly away from our graver works of politics and science, to expatiate upon that which every body understands and agrees in; and after setting us diligently to read over again what we had scarce finished reading, leaves us no choice but to tell our readers what they all know already, and to persuade them of that of which they are most intimately convinced.

  The author seems to be at home everywhere, and know every thing. His knowledge, however, has not the air of learning, amassed to be told; it is something gathered incidentally, whilst he was studying men in their pursuits, customs and amusements,—something fallen in with rather than sought. The commonest things, the lowest characters belong to the action,—it rarely stands still for the sake of description. You are in the midst of life, gaining knowledge as well as entertainment, by a process akin to actual experience and observation. Every man is in his proper situation, and suitable discourse is put into his mouth,—we have the peculiarities of his gait, the expression of his face, the tone of his voice, everything, in short, which is significant of character, or that adds to its reality;—and these are not given once for all in a formal description, but they come out in connexion with his feelings, situation or employment, and vary with them. He is allowed to unfold himself, to practise upon others, to utter fine thoughts or foolish ones, and betray all his infirmities and motives and every influence that presses on him, without the dread that he is destined for a book and therefore upon his good behaviour.

  I acted to-night with spirit and in a manly tone, better, perhaps, than ordinarily in the part “Rob Roy.”

  There is a peculiar fascination investing this story and its characters, and scenery that can be associated with them. Indeed, few of Scott’s works have more readers, or so abound in picturesque incidents and persons, nearly all represented in romantic places, many of which can now be identified, and visited with pleasure; for this is the story of curious, old, half-haunted Osbaldistone Hall; of Glasgow Cathedral, and of the Highlands at Loch Ard; of the Scotch Robin Hood; of charming, miraculous Die Vernon; of inimitable Bailie Nichol Jarvie of the Saut Market; of that natural, calculating, conceited, semi-rascal, Andrew Fairservice; and of that wholly villainous Jesuit, Rashleigh.

Heart of Mid-Lothian, 1818

  Our general admiration of the story of the “Heart of Mid-Lothian” does not, of course, extend to the management of all the details. The beginning, or rather the beginnings, for there are half a dozen of them, are singularly careless. The author, in his premature anxiety to get in medias res, introduces us at the point where the different interests converge; and then, instead of floating down the united streams of events, we are forced separately to ascend each of its tributary branches, like Humboldt examining the bifurcations of the Oroonoko, until we forget, in exploring their sources, the manner in which they bear on one another.

  During the Centenary festivities the Emperor of Brazil arrived in Edinburgh, and on the first morning of his stay he went at five o’clock in the morning, with the “Heart of Mid-Lothian” in his hand, to try and identify the localities about the region where the old Tolbooth formerly stood, described in the novel. A gentleman and lady at whose house he took luncheon assured me that the emperor had succeeded admirably in his identifications, which he declared to be due to the precision and vividness of Scott’s descriptions.

  Last Evening I heard Jeanie Deans’ Audience with Argyle, and then with the Queen. There I stop with the Book. Oh, how refreshing is the leisurely, easy, movement of the Story, with its true and well-harmonized Variety of Scene and Character! There is of course a Bore, Saddletree—as in Shakespeare, I presume to think—as in Cervantes—as in Life itself: somewhat too much of him in Scott, perhaps. But when the fuliginous and spasmodic Carlyle and Co. talk of Scott’s delineating his Characters from without to within—why, he seems to have had a pretty good Staple of the inner Man of David, and Jeanie Deans, on beginning his Story.

  There we get his richest humour and his purest pathos, and especially that blending of the two, when the tears are close behind the smiles—as in “The Heart of Mid-Lothian” for instance—in which again he has been surpassed only by Shakespeare, and equalled, I think, only by Cervantes.

  It has often been said that Sir Walter Scott excelled in his feminine characters, and we must, we think, agree in this assertion and venture to assign the foremost place to this beautiful type of Lowland lassie, which he has drawn with such truth and with such a loving touch.

The Bride of Lammermoor, 1819

  It is a tragedy of the highest order, and unites excellence of plot to our author’s usual merits of character and description.

  We see, even at the very beginning of the tale, the “little cloud, no bigger than a man’s hand” which gradually overshadows the whole atmosphere, and at last bursts in ruin, in madness, and in despair over the devoted heads of Ravenswood and his betrothed. The catastrophe is tremendous, crushing, complete; and even the more comic scenes (the melancholy ingenuity of poor faithful Caleb) have a sad and hopeless gaiety, which forms a dismal and appropriate relief to the profoundly tragic tone of the action. One scene in this awful tale is truly terrific—the muttered cursing of the three hideous hags at the ill-omened marriage; nor is the interview between Ravenswood and the grave-digger, or the appearance of the unhappy hero to claim his promise from Lucy Ashton, inferior. They bear the impress of our elder dramatists; they might have been conceived by Ford, by Middleton, or by the sombre genius of Webster.

  Scott could neither have described nor even conceived the progress of jealousy in Othello. He could not have described nor even conceived that contrast between Curiace and either Horace, father or son, in which is so sublimely revealed the secret of the Roman ascendency. But, as an artist of Narrative and not of the Drama, Scott was perhaps the greater for his omissions. Let any reader bring to his recollection that passage in the grandest tragic romance our language possesses—the “Bride of Lammermoor”—in which, the night before the Master of Ravenswood vanishes from the tale, he shuts himself up in his fated tower, and all that is known of the emotions through which his soul travailed is the sound of his sleepless heavy tread upon the floor of his solitary room. What can be grander in narrative art than the suppression of all dramatic attempt to analyse emotion and reduce its expression to soliloquy?

  In some respects the best and most artistic of Scott’s novels.

  The most perfect, of all tragic poems in prose between the date of “Manon Lescaut” and the date of “Notre-Dame de Paris.”

  He calls it an “owre true tale.” Never was a more unreal story written. Ravenswood is a mere stage figure, or, as Carlyle would say, a tissue of gloomy theatricalities. Then we have in Lucy Ashton another puppet; while her mother impresses us as an unnatural being, a downright monster. We may digest Lady Macbeth, but who could swallow Lady Ashton? The old Scottish servant, Caleb Balderstone, is the only lifelike person in the story. Here then we have another example of Scott’s feebleness as a delineator of character.

  “No man since Æschylus could have written ‘The Bride of Lammermoor’”—such are the words of Mr. Gladstone, quoted in the Life of Lord Tennyson. “The most pure and powerful of all the tragedies that Scott ever penned”—such is the deliberate criticism of Lockhart. “Scott’s first approach to failure in prose”—such is the verdict of Professor Saintsbury on a book which, whatever be its merits or demerits, is unique in the position which it holds amongst the Waverley Novels…. He was supreme not by virtue of construction, but in the absence of it. And yet none the less it is true that in this one novel he has fulfilled, as no other novelist has ever done, and as he himself has never done elsewhere, dramatic conditions by which he was not bound, and by which it would be absurd that romance should be fettered; and that he has united in this single work the free play and variety of romance with the fundamental unity of the tragic drama…. That “The Bride of Lammermoor” is his greatest novel few perhaps will maintain. But surely the vast majority of critics will recognise in it, not “an approach to failure,” but a combination of romance and dramatic tragedy which is absolutely unique.

  To the merits in detail of “The Bride of Lammermoor” I never have hesitated to do justice, though I think them more sparingly found than in the case of most of the earlier novels…. I still maintain, for the reasons which “Maga” permitted me to give three months ago, that the tragedy of “The Bride of Lammermoor” is not “pure,”—is indeed distinctly faulty; and that, as I observed in the little book of which Sir Henry speaks so kindly, it is in its composition and general character as a novel, not indeed a failure, but Scott’s first approach to one.

Ivanhoe, 1819

  Never were the long-gathered stores of most extensive erudition applied to the purposes of imaginative genius with so much easy, lavish, and luxurious power; never was the illusion of fancy so complete.

  “Ivanhoe” was received throughout England with a more clamorous delight than any of the Scotch novels had been. The volumes were now for the first time of the post 8vo. form, with a finer paper than hitherto, the press-work much more elegant, and the price accordingly raised from eight shillings a volume to ten; yet the copies sold in this original shape were twelve thousand…. The publication of “Ivanhoe” marks the most brilliant epoch in Scott’s history as the literary favorite of his contemporaries. With the novel which he next put forth the immediate sale of them began gradually to decline.

  Perhaps the most favourite novel in the English language.

  We believe it is not generally known that the honor of having been the prototype and inspiration of the character of Rebecca the Jewess, in “Ivanhoe,” belongs to an American lady, whose beauty and noble qualities were described to Scott by a friend. The friend was Washington Irving, and the lady Rebecca Gratz, of an honorable Jewish family of Philadelphia.

  “Ivanhoe” is such a very dear and old friend that no one who has ever been a boy can pretend to apply to it any stern critical tests.

  Tested by … the magic by which it evokes the past, the skill with which legend and history are used to create a poetic atmosphere … the masterly delineation of nationalities and professions, and representatives of every order and rank; above all its fundamental rightness,… tested by these qualities, “Ivanhoe” deserves its fame as one of the great romances of the world.

  “Ivanhoe,” which appeared at the end of 1819, marked a new departure. Scott was now drawing upon his reading instead of his personal experience, and the book has not the old merit of serious portraiture of real life. But its splendid audacity, its vivid presentation of mediæval life, and the dramatic vigour of the narrative, may atone for palpable anachronisms and melodramatic impossibilities. The story at once achieved the popularity which it has always enjoyed, and was more successful in England than any of the so-called “Scottish novels.” It was Scott’s culminating success in a book-selling sense, and marked the highest point both of his literary and his social prosperity.

  “Ivanhoe” has delighted readers for full seventy years, and it delights them every whit as much to-day as it did the generation to which it first appealed.

  It did not seem desirable to point out in special notes the many inaccuracies and errors, grammatical and rhetorical, that may be found in “Ivanhoe.” If the student is sensitive to such things he will easily discover them; and if he does not detect them he is probably destined to be a soldier, a sailor, or some such bold and active person to whom the technicalities of expression will not matter…. In “Ivanhoe” we breathe the sane and wholesome air of a heroic simple life—the life of objective deeds and sheer accomplishment. To the brave company that peoples our world of dreams it adds many figures, noble, bold, beautiful, gay—knights and ladies, merry-men and troubadours, pilgrim and crusader, friar and jester. It touches the past with a glow of poetry, lighting up situations, institutions, and men, making real and rich for us those things that in the technical records seem meagre and colorless. Its style gives us the refreshment of writing which, though it may not be delicately correct, is also not consciously fine nor painfully precise, but which moves buoyantly forward without strain and without weariness.

Kenilworth, 1821

  We have just laid our hands on “Kenilworth.” I saluted it with as much enthusiasm as a Catholic would a holy relic. It is now lying beside me, looking so fresh and tempting that I think I deserve some credit for having resisted it thus far.

  Though “Kenilworth” must rank high among his works, we think it inferior, as a whole, to his other tragedies, the “Bride of Lammermoor,” the historical part of “Waverley,” and the “Abbot,” both in materials and in execution. Amy Robsart and Elizabeth occupy nearly the same space upon the canvas as Catherine Seyton and Mary. But almost all the points of interest, which are divided between Amy and Elizabeth, historical recollections, beauty, talents, attractive virtues and unhappy errors, exalted rank and deep misfortune, are accumulated in Mary; and we want altogether that union of the lofty and the elegant, of enthusiasm and playfulness, which enchanted us in Catherine…. It is a fault perhaps of the conclusion, that it is too uniformly tragical…. The immediate circumstances of Amy’s death, as she rushes to meet, what she supposes to be, her husband’s signal, almost pass the limit that divides pity from horror.

  “Kenilworth,” however, is a flight of another wing—and rises almost, if not altogether, to the level of “Ivanhoe;” displaying, perhaps, as much power in assembling together, and distributing in striking groups, the copious historical materials of that romantic age, as the other does in eking out their scantiness by the riches of the author’s imagination.

  Was particularly interested by your description of Kenilworth, round which Walter Scott’s admirable novel has cast a halo of romance forever; for many who would have cared little about it as the residence of Leicester, honored for some days by the presence of Elizabeth, will remember with a thrill of interest and pity the night poor Amy Robsart passed there, and the scene between her, Leicester, and the queen, when that prince of villains, Varney, claims her as his wife. But in spite of the romantic and historical associations belonging to the place, I do not think it would have “inspired my muse.”

  I am glad you like “Kenilworth.” It is certainly a splendid production, more resembling a romance than a novel, and, in my opinion, one of the most interesting works that ever emanated from the great Sir Walter’s pen. I was exceedingly amused at the characteristic and naïve manner in which you expressed your detestation of Varney’s character—so much so, indeed, that I could not forbear laughing aloud when I perused that part of your letter. He is certainly the personification of consummate villainy; and in the delineation of his dark and profoundly artful mind, Scott exhibits a wonderful knowledge of human nature as well as surprising skill in embodying his perceptions so as to enable others to become participators in that knowledge.

  I—We—have finished all Sir Walter’s Scotch Novels; and I thought I would try an English one: Kenilworth—a wonderful Drama, which Theatre, Opera, and Ballet (as I once saw it represented) may well reproduce. The Scene at Greenwich, where Elizabeth “interviews” Sussex and Leicester, seemed to me as fine as what is called (I am told, wrongly) Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. Of course, plenty of melodrama in most other parts:—but the Plot wonderful.

The Pirate, 1821

  The “Pirate,” I am afraid, has been scared and alarmed by the Beacon! It is certainly one of the least fortunate of Sir Walter Scott’s productions. It seems now that he can write nothing without Meg Merrilies and Dominie Samson! One other such novel, and there’s an end. But who can last forever? Who ever lasted so long.

  Norna is a new incarnation of Meg Merrilies, and palpably the same in the spirit. Less degraded in her habits and associates, and less lofty and pathetic in her denunciations, she reconciles fewer contradictions, and is, on the whole, inferior perhaps to her prototype; but is far above the rank of a mere imitated or borrowed character.

  I have been reading Sir Walter’s “Pirate” again, and am very glad to find how much I like it—that is speaking far below the mark—I may say how I wonder and delight in it. I am rejoiced to find that this is so; and I am quite sure that it is not owing to my old prejudice, but to the intrinsic merit and beauty of the Book itself. With all its faults of detail, often mere carelessness, what a broad Shakespearian Daylight over it all, and all with no Effort, and—a lot else that one may be contented to feel without having to write an Essay about. They won’t beat Sir Walter in a hurry (I mean of course his earlier, Northern, Novels,) and he was such a fine Fellow that I really don’t believe any one would wish to cast him in the Shade.

The Fortunes of Nigel, 1822

  It is strange how much Nigel has haunted me while reading it. In spite of all my resistance and correction of the illusion by suggesting to myself that the author may order events as he pleases, I am extremely interested by it. But I think it is partly because I consider it all as substantially true, giving the account of the manners and incidents of the day. Surely some parts absurd, as making the usurer’s dry firm daughter marry the Scotch servant. Even the watchmaker forced. But some admirable strokes of nature and character. Hard on Charles I.

  While it certainly presents us with a very brilliant, and, we believe, a very faithful sketch of the manners and habits of the time, we cannot say that it either embodies them in a very interesting story, or supplies us with any rich variety of particular characters. Except King James himself, and Richie Moniplies, there is but little individuality in the personages represented. We should perhaps add Master George Heriot; except that he is too staid and prudent a person to engage very much of our interest.

  The “Fortunes of Nigel” is perhaps behind nothing the author ever wrote, for dramatic power and masterly portraiture of character.

  It can scarcely be conceded that Scott was successful in filling out the character of the nominal hero of “The Fortunes of Nigel,” who, sooth to say, is but a sorry nobleman “of the period.” Neither did he make much of George Heriot, founder of the splendid institution which has perpetuated his name in Edinburgh. But King James is one of the best drawn of his numerous historical portraits. We see him in public and in private, pedantic and mean, with scarcely a thought above self. Prince Charles and the Duke of Buckingham merely pass across the stage. Moniplies, Nigel’s servant, is a new edition, revised and corrected, of Andrew Fairservice, in “Roy Roy.” Among the courtiers, the old Earl of Huntington is almost the only gentleman. Honest John Christie, of Paul’s Wharf, who was “cursed in a fair wife,” bears his wrongs with dignity. The Alsatian scenes are admirable and new; at least in prose fiction, though not in some of the old plays. For a heroine, Margaret Ramsay is far above the average; though, according to Scott’s favorite practice, she dons the attire of a page for some little time.

  We are reading “Nigel,” which I had not expected to care for: but so far as I got—four first Chapters—makes me long for Night to hear more. That return of Richie to his Master, and dear George Heriot’s visit just after! Oh, Sir Walter is not done for yet by Austens and Eliots. If one of his Merits were not his clear Daylight, one thinks, there ought to be Societies to keep his Lamp trimmed as well as—Mr. Browning.

St. Ronan’s Well, 1824

  I have dipped in the new “Well,” which was fit and proper for me to do, as all the family were plashing in it; and it is one of my duties to influence their judgments, as well as to lead their taste, if taste can be led. I differ from you and many others about this Well, and still hold to my old maxim, that “king’s caff is better than ither folk’s corn.” We are, in the first place, startled at seeing an old friend with a new face: we have been accustomed to meet him in the familiar walks of natural feeling and character, or in the loftier scenes of courtly splendour, chivalrous manners, and romantic sentiments. The fashionables of the day, exaggerated as they are, among the idle and worthless in those haunts of idleness and dissipation called watering-places, is quite a new field, in which there is not so much for the heart as in the former, nor so much to elevate and fill the imagination as in the latter. This work is, in short, what none of the rest were, an obvious intentional satire; and we do not so readily follow him in this new and thorny walk. The story, I grant, hangs very ill together, and so do Shakspeare’s; but there is character, sense, and truth, and the moral is good. In short, though the caff may abound, it is still king’s caff.

  It is strange, but only a part of the general simplicity of Scott’s genius, that these revivals of earlier power were unconscious, and that the time of extreme weakness in which he wrote “St. Ronan’s Well,” was that in which he first asserted his own restoration.

  There is certainly to be said for “St. Ronan’s,” that, in spite of the heaviness of some of the scenes at the “hottle” and the artificial melodramatic character of some of the personages, none of Scott’s stories is of more absorbing or more brilliantly diversified interest. Contradictions between contemporary popular opinion and mature critical judgment, as well as diversities of view among critics themselves, rather shake confidence in individual judgment on the vexed but not particularly wise question which is the best of Scott’s novels.

Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, 1827

  You are the first person from whom I have heard a word in favor of Scott’s “Napoleon,” and I am really glad to hear some good of it, as I was afraid it was too probable that he had been bookmaking. The defect which you mention is attributable to the defect of moral force in Scott’s character; invariable candour and moderation in judging men is generally accompanied by such a defect. Scott seems to be always disposed to approve of rectitude of conduct and to acquiesce in the general rules of morality, but without any instinctive or unconquerable aversion from vice—witness his friendship for Byron.

  I am reading Walter Scott’s “Napoleon,” which I do with the greatest pleasure. I am as much surprised at it as at any of his works. So current, so sensible, animated, well arranged; so agreeable to take up, so difficult to put down, and, for him, so candid! there are, of course, many mistakes, but that has nothing to do with the general complexion of the work.

  It is true that the author may be reproached with great inaccuracy, and equally great partiality, but even these two defects give to his work particular value in my eyes. The success of the book, in England, was great beyond all expectation; and hence we see that Walter Scott, in this very hatred for Napoleon and the French, has been the true interpreter and representative of the English popular opinion and national feeling. His book will not be by any means a document for the history of France, but it will be one for the history of England. At all events, it is a voice which could not be wanting in this important historical process.

  The paper and print of the first and second edition, in nine volumes, brought the creditors £18,000—an amount of gain, in relation to amount of labour, unexampled in the history of literature, and which will probably have no parallel for ages to come.

  It is not a satisfactory performance. Written too near the time of which it treats to be quite impartial, it also bears in many places the marks of haste and imperfect execution. The training through which Scott had been going for the previous ten years, was not of a kind to fit him for working with perfect patience upon a theme so vast and difficult.

Fair Maid of Perth, 1828

  Walter Scott’s “Fair Maid of Perth” is excellent, is it not? There is finish! there is a hand! What a firm foundation for the whole, and in particulars not a touch which does not lead to the catastrophe! Then, what details of dialogue and description, both of which are excellent. His scenes and situations are like pictures by Teniers; in the arrangement they show the summit of art, the individual figures have a speaking truth, and the execution is extended with artistical love to the minutest details, so that not a stroke is lost.

  To me, one of the most remarkable figures he ever drew was that of Conachar. Nothing could be more difficult than to provoke at once pity, contempt, and sympathy for a coward. Yet he has successfully achieved this feat; and as far as I can recollect, it is the sole instance in English literature where such an attempt was ever made. More than this, he has drawn two cowards in this remarkable novel,—each quite different from the other and contrasted with eminent skill—the comic, swaggering, good-natured, fussy little coward, Oliver Proudfute, who provokes a perpetual smile; and the sullen, irritable, proud, and revengeful coward, Conachar, whom we cannot but pity, while we despise him. “The Fair Maid of Perth” was always a favorite of mine. It has perhaps more variety of interest, incident, and characters than any he ever wrote, and it never flags.

General

	The day arrived—blest be the day,
	Walter the Abbot came that way!
	*        *        *        *        *
	Then poured the numbers bold and free,
	The ancient magic melody.
	The land was charmed to list his lays;
	It knew the harp of ancient days.
	The Border chiefs, that lone had been
	In sepulchres unhearsed and green,
	Passed from their mouldy vaults away,
	In armour red and stern array,
	And by their moonlight halls were seen,
	In visor helm, and habergeon.
	Even fairies sought our land again,
	So powerful was the magic strain.

	… the Ariosto of the North,
	Sang ladye-love and war, romance and knightly worth.

  The broad and “high way” to fame, which he has hewn out for himself, is strewn with no thorns, and surrounded by no unseemly sights, to wound the feet, or injure the eyes, of such who choose to walk in it. No Upas tree sheds its poison here.

	Thou, upon a hundred streams,
	By tales of love and sorrow,
	Of faithful love, undaunted truth,
	Hast shed the power of Yarrow;
	And streams unknown, hills yet unseen,
	Wherever they invite Thee,
	At parent Nature’s grateful call,
	With gladness must requite Thee.
	A gracious welcome shall be thine,
	Such looks of love and honour
	As thy own Yarrow gave to me
	When first I gazed upon her;
	Beheld what I had feared to see,
	Unwilling to surrender
	Dreams treasured up from early days,
	The holy and the tender.

  Criticism on his works is now superfluous. They have taken their enduring station in the literature of the world. If the applause of foreign nations be equivalent, as it is said, to the voice of posterity, no author who ever wrote has obtained that honor in so large a measure. His novels, his poems, have been translated into every civilized language; his heroes and heroines have become household words all over the world. The painter, the sculptor, the engraver, the musician, have sought inspiration from his pages. The names of his works, or the personages introduced into them, are impressed on the man-of-war or the quadrille, the race-horse or the steamboat. The number of persons who became famous by following in their different lines, the ideas of Sir Walter, is immense, and comprehends all classes of intellect or enterprise. The tribes of imitators, whether of his verse or prose, whom he has called into existence, are countless. Many of them are persons of great abilities and unquestioned genius. Which of them will be named in competition with the master? Not one.

  The illustrious painter of Scotland seems to me to have created a false class; he has, in my opinion, confounded history and romance: the novelist has set about writing historical romances, and the historian romantic histories…. I refuse, therefore, to sit in judgment on any English author whose merit does not appear to me to reach that degree of superiority which it has in the eyes of his countrymen.

  Scott was, in truth, master of the picturesque. He understood, better than any historian since the time of Livy, how to dispose his lights and shades so as to produce the most striking result. This property of romance he had a right to borrow. This talent is particularly observable in the animated parts of his story—in his battles, for example. No man ever painted those terrible scenes with greater effect. He had a natural relish for gunpowder; and his mettle roused, like that of the war-horse, at the sound of the trumpet. His acquaintance with military science enabled him to employ a technical phraseology, just technical enough to give a knowing air to his descriptions, without embarrassing the reader by a pedantic display of unintelligible jargon. This is a talent rare in a civilian. Nothing can be finer than many of his battle-pieces in his “Life of Bonaparte,” unless, indeed, we except one or two in his “History of Scotland:” as the fight of Bannockburn, for example, in which Burns’s “Scots, wha hae” seems to breathe in every line.

  Close observation of nature, whether animated or inanimate, was his great characteristic; the brilliancy of fancy, the force of imagination, were directed to clothing with sparkling colours her varied creations. It is hard to say whether his genius was most conspicuous in describing the beauties of nature or delineating the passions of the heart: he was at once pictorial and dramatic. To this he owes his great success,—hence his world-wide reputation. He was first known as a poet; but, charming as his poetic conceptions were, they were ere long eclipsed by the wide-spread fame of his prose romances. The Novels of the Author of Waverley caused the poems of Walter Scott to be for a time forgotten. But time has reestablished them in their celebrity; and, great as is still the fame of the Scotch novels, it is rivaled by the heart-stirring verses of “Marmion,” the enduring charm of the “Lady of the Lake.”… No man ever threw a more charming radiance over the traditions of ancient times, but none ever delineated in a nobler spirit the virtues of the present; and his discriminating eye discovered them equally under the thatch of the cottage as in the halls of the castle. It has been truly said that the influence of his writings neutralized, to a certain extent, the effect of the Reform Bill; but it is not less true that none ever contributed more powerfully to that purification without which all others are nugatory,—the reform of the human heart; and perhaps he is the only author of numerous works of fiction of whom it may with truth be said that he never wrote a line which, on death-bed, he could wish recalled.

	Like a fair country stretching wide
	With woods on woods in leafy pride
	And fields of golden grain,
	And moors with purple heather glowing,
	And healthful breezes bravely blowing,
	Spreads Scott his vast domain.

  Now this vast and salutary change in national opinion is directly due to Scott. Something of the kind might possibly have come with time; but he, in fact, was the man whose lot was to accomplish it. This may be regarded, on the whole, as his greatest achievement. He united the sympathies of two hostile races by the sheer force of genius. He healed the bitterness of centuries. Scott did much in idealizing, as poetry should, the common life of his contemporaries. He equally did much in rendering the past history, and the history of other countries in which Scotchmen played a conspicuous part, real to us. But it is hardly a figure of speech to say, that he created the Celtic Highlands in the eyes of the whole civilized world. If this be not first-rate power, it may be asked where we are to find it.

  Walter Scott pauses on the threshold of the soul, and in the vestibule of history, selects in the Renaissance and the Middle Age only the fit and agreeable, blots out frank language, licentious sensuality, bestial ferocity. After all, his characters, to whatever age he transports them, are his neighbors, “cannie” farmers, vain lairds, gloved gentlemen, young marriageable ladies, all more or less common-place, that is, well-ordered by education and character, hundreds of miles away from the voluptuous fools of the Restoration, or the heroic brutes and fierce beasts of the Middle Age. As he has the richest supply of costumes, and the most inexhaustible talent for scenic effect, he makes his whole world get on very pleasantly, and composes tales which, in truth, have only the merit of fashion, but which yet may last a hundred years.

  The English claim Scott for the world; the Scotch ken him for their own. He is beloved at home, and revered abroad. We all know him intimately already from his Poems, his Tales, and his Life. There is a nobility of thought and action in his Poems which stamps him as the Poet of Chivalry. Combined with this high tone, there is minute fidelity of description, which marks careful observation and the love of Truth. There is an active principle in Scott’s Novels, which, like a bracing wind, brings invigorating health and purity along with it. Where his spirit meets with kindred feeling, the reader rises a stouter-hearted man, a more genial companion, and returns to his work in life with a determination to throw greater energy into what he has to do.

  Of Walter Scott one need as little speak as of Shakespeare. He belongs to mankind, to every age and race, and he certainly must be counted as in the first line of the great creative minds of the world. His unique glory is to have definitely succeeded in the ideal reproduction of historical types, so as to preserve at once beauty, life, and truth, a task which neither Ariosto and Tasso, nor Corneille and Racine, nor Alfieri, nor Goethe and Schiller—no! nor even Shakespeare himself entirely achieved. It is true that their instrument was the more exacting one of verse, whilst Scott’s was prose. But in brilliancy of conception, in wealth of character, in dramatic art, in glow and harmony of colour, Scott put forth all the powers of a master poet.

  Let the critics praise him, or let them blame. It matters not. His reputation will not wane, but will grow with time. Therefore we do well to make much of Walter Scott. He is the only Homer who has been vouchsafed to Scotland—I might almost say to modern Europe. He came at the latest hour when it was possible for a great epic minstrel to be born. And the altered conditions of the world will not admit of another.

  The delight of my youth was Scott, especially his poetry. I began with the poems, and read them so often that I almost knew them by heart before I had read a single page of the prose tales. “The Lady of the Lake” was my especial favourite, and I have no doubt that my early enthusiasm for that delightful poem implanted in me a love for beautiful lakes with romantic islands in them which had practical consequences afterwards. Even to this day these feelings are as lively in me as ever, so that nothing in the world seems to me so completely delightful as a lake if one has a sailing-boat to wander over it. Scott, too, had the same love for hills and streams that I had imbibed from nature in my youth, and in his narratives of adventure he suited my temper so exactly, that to read him was a complete satisfaction, without any drawback whatever. To a youth who becomes thoughtful Scott is insufficient, but a man who has got through most of his serious thinking may return to him again and receive from him much of the old refreshment and delight. I am still a reader of Scott, and never appreciated the qualities of “Ivanhoe” so completely as on reading that masterpiece last year. Of all authors, it is Scott who has given me the greatest sum of pleasure, and that of a very healthy kind.

  It is one of the griefs of my old age that I know Scott by heart; but still, if I take up a volume of him, it is not laid down again for the next hour.

  I find myself, as years multiply, inclined to return with most relish to Walter Scott, because of the supreme reality, out-door freshness, and simplicity of his stories. They are not disguised philosophy or disguised anything else, but they are the vivacious, adequate impressions of a mind thoroughly sincere and wholesome in its sympathy with men and things. “The Fair Maid of Perth” or “Old Mortality” brings, to one who is no longer tempted to quicken his pace by the fascination of a story, pleasant thoughts of pleasant people, and sharp resentment for wicked ones—a mixed assembly, such as has made the world, everywhere and at all times, hopeful and fearful, a land whose clouds veil but do not extinguish its sunlight.

  His reasoning energy was locked up organically, let us say, in his marvellous imagination. And so, remembering all that Scott has left us,—those imperishable tales and romances which no subsequent successes in the British literature of fiction have superseded, and by the glamour of which his own little land of brown heath and shaggy wood, formerly of small account in the world, has become a dream and fascination for all the leisurely of all the nations,—need we cease, after all, from thinking of him in juxtaposition, due interval allowed, with England’s greatest man, the whole world’s greatest man, of the literary order, or abandon the habit of speaking of Sir Walter Scott as our Scottish Shakespeare?

  The idiosyncrasies of Scott’s genius are various and delicate: his eye for color is as fine as any modern colorist’s…. Notwithstanding his picturesque descriptions, Scott was a poor judge of the pictorial art: Abbotsford was decorated with pictures that were mere daubs.

	Lost the Homeric swing and trot,
	Jingle of spur and beam of blade,
	Of that moss-trooper, Walter Scott,
	Riding upon his border raid,
	And pricking south with all his power
	To capture Shakespeare’s feudal tower!

  To him what further tribute is it possible for love or loyalty, for reverence or devotion to pay? While the language in which he wrote endures, while the human nature to which he addressed himself exists, there can be no end of the delight, the thanksgiving, and the honour with which men will salute, aloud or in silence, the utterance or the remembrance of his name.

  It may safely be said that Scott is to his own country what no other writer ever has been to any country. Shakespeare no doubt may have been a greater genius than he, but Scott has done for Scotland what Shakespeare never did for England. Scotland from one end to the other is haunted with Scott’s genius. The imaginary events of his novels have there almost taken the place of the actual events of history; and it is his novel rather than history that make it seem an historical country. A country small, remote, and till lately poor, with a population which recently was scarcely half that of contemporary London, and with manners and modes of thought peculiar in their severe provincialism—Scott has made it a country familiar to two hemispheres. Shakespeare may be said to go out to meet the imagination of strange readers; Scott compels the imagination of his readers to come to him among his own hills. Who when he visits Windsor thinks of Sir John Falstaff? Who when he visits Wigtonshire does not think of Guy Mannering? The Highland mountains are seen through an air enchanted and bewitched by Scott. Half the traffic on the Highland railway, if not the railway itself, is due to him; and but for him Inverness would probably be still an obscure village. One of the principal railway routes from London to Edinburgh is called by the name of one of his imaginary characters; and the historical name of a place in Lanarkshire has been cancelled and been replaced by the one which he gave in “Old Mortality.” Of Hamlet it has been said that he is not a man but that he is man. Of Scott’s characters it may be said that they are not men and women only, but a nation, and a nation in its own home.

  In Scott the paragraphing of conversation proceeds by the modern method uniformly. His narrative and descriptive paragraphs have a certain unity always, and at times reveal a very high degree of picturesque grouping. The general straightforward coherence of his paragraphs is not to be disputed.

  “Rubbish.” It is a harsh word, and might well make Dean Stanley and a bygone generation of worshippers and believers in the plenary inspiration of Scott stir uneasily in their graves. It grates upon my own ear. But if it is a true word, what then? Why even then it does not matter very much, for when Time that old ravager, has done his very worst, there will be enough left of Sir Walter to carry down his name and fame to the remotest age. He cannot be ejected from his native land. Loch Katrine and Loch Leven are not exposed to criticism, and they will pull Sir Walter through.

  The defects of his prose are the more serious ones of slipshod and tawdry sentences, of clumsy and lumbering paragraphs. Where he is solemn or dignified, he rarely troubles himself with the virtues of restraint or selection; he never attempts the subtle harmony of words, or balances his style to suit with nicety the sentiments he wishes to convey. A certain amount of grandiloquence has often a quaint flavour of humour, but it is seldom so with Scott. His phrases are often rotund and ornate, but this seems to come from a careless conventionality of habit, and not from deliberate art. He pours out his words without discrimination, and frequently with an absence of all taste for style, which is perhaps akin to the insensibility of perception which his biographer admits—his obtuseness to what was disagreeable in smell or colour, his lack of musical ear, his bluntness to some of the more common tastes. He himself recognised the lack with his usual magnanimity, and neither resented its suggestion nor defended its faults…. The wonder is not that Scott’s style had defects, but that it was not much worse. He never studied it. His mind was filled with the picturesque in scenery and in conception, and he had neither room nor leisure for more. And if the instrument was sometimes defective, no one used it with a more consummate ease. His style is best where we notice it least; and often the thrilling force and fire of genius, burning underneath, sublimes it into a certain unconscious grandeur. Nay, even this very common-placeness of Scott’s style is not without its value. An artistic style must be redolent both of the writer and of his age; and the impersonality of Scott’s style rather adds to, than detracts from, the perennial interest of his romance.

  We do not go to him for a word-craft; men of shorter imaginative range, and whose judgments wait on conventional rule, must guide us in such direction, and pose as our modellers of style. Goldsmith and Swift both may train in that company. But this master we are now considering wrote so swiftly and dashed so strongly into the current of what he had to say, that he was indifferent to methods and words, except what went to engage the reader and keep him always cognizant of his purpose. But do you say that this is the best aim of all writing? Most surely it is wise for a writer to hold attention by what arts he can: failing of this, he fails of the best half of his intent; but if he gains this by simple means, by directness, by limpid language, and no more of it than the thought calls for, and by such rhythmic and beguiling use of it as tempts the reader to follow, he is a safer exemplar than one who by force of genius can accomplish his aims by loose expressions and redundance of words.

  Another man of letters for whom Newman had a great love was Walter Scott. He delighted not only in the “Waverley Novels,” but, like Mr. Ruskin, in Scott’s chivalrous poetry.

  He never tried to be unlike somebody else; if he hit, as he did hit, upon great new styles of literature,—absolutely new in the case of the historical novel, revived after a long trance in the case of the verse tale,—it was from no desire to innovate, but because his genius called him. Though in ordinary ways he was very much a man of his time, he did not contort himself in any fashion by way of expressing a (then) modern spirit, a Georgian idiosyncrasy, or anything of that sort; he was content with the language of the best writers and the thoughts of the best men. He was no amateur of the topsy-turvy, and had not the very slightest desire to show how a literary head could grow beneath the shoulders. He was satisfied that his genius should flow naturally. And the consequence is that it was never checked, that it flows still for us with all its spontaneous charm, and that it will flow in omne volubilis ævum.