A select few, of course, may read the highest literature as savoring of novels for the sake of the psychology, patrician insolence.

or theology, or sociology, or what not, It is unnecessary for our present purwhich is contained in them; but to the pose to say much of the Waverley great majority the story, the action, are plots. Scott has been charged with everything, to be garnished only with making too much use of the same matethese materials and not larded with rials: the lost heir turning up, for inthem. The great scene of human life, stance, in " Guy Mannering," "The the succession of incidents by which Antiquary," "The Abbot," and "Redthe happiness or misery, the guilt or gauntlet;" of sometimes huddling up innocence of individuals is ultimately and sometimes spinning out his concludetermined, are subjects of inexhaust- sions, and of being needlessly discurible interest, and appeal to those hu- sive in his introductions. But the real man instincts which are universal and question to be asked is, who has ever indestructible. And it is because Scott been conscious of any monotonous effrom first to last relies on these great fect in reading these several stories? primary interests, without calling in Who has ever felt that Lovel is too the aid of moral or metaphysical specu- nearly a repetition of Bertram, Roland lation, that he preserves that freshness Græme of Lovel, or Darsie Latimer of and catholicity which are the only pass- Roland Græme? Scott has so handled ports to immortality. There is an air this particular element of interest as of springtime in all the best of the to make each manifestation of it comWaverleys, more charming perhaps as pletely new. With regard to the other we advance in years than before we charges, we should be ready to allow are way worn and dust-besprinkled. that the introduction to "Waverley" But on all alike, young and old, the was too long and even tedious, were rapid movement, the quick sequence of it not the introduction to so much because and effect, the constant presence sides, we might almost say to the whole of the actors on the stage, the influence series of the Stewart novels. The in a word of the story itself, unin- early correspondence between Darsie terrupted by digressions or asides, Latimer and Allan Fairford in "Redproduces an effect which not even a gauntlet " we always have thought exLytton or a Brontë, neither a Mrs. tremely tiresome, and is the only thing Evans nor a Mrs. Ward, cau ever hope Scott ever wrote that we habitually to equal, though writers of this class skip. The conclusion of "Rob Roy " may appeal with more immediate suc- is, like the end of a parliamentary sescess to certain transient phases of the sion, preceded by the massacre, we public taste, or to appetites vitiated for cannot say of the innocents, but of a the moment by less wholesome forms number of persons who had to be got of literature. But we venture to pre-out of the way, and are conveniently dict that the world will always, after killed off in "the Fifteen" without each of these excursions into the having done anything to deserve it. realms of fancy, come back again to But we cannot agree with those who Scott, as it comes back again to Shake- say that the "Heart of Midlothian " speare. It matters not whether at any should have ended with the rescue of given time the Waverleys are more or Effie, and the marriage of Jeanie and less real. The balance of this or that Reuben Butler. The discovery of Efdate, as Owen says of the house of fie's child arises naturally out of the Osbaldistone, may be brought out story, and the attendant circumstances against them. But their solvency is are all in the highest degree appropriassured nevertheless, and their reign ate. The plot would hardly have been will only terminate with the disappear- complete without this last act; and ance of the Muses before the advance though it may be too long, we would of a debasing isocracy, which already not willingly part with any one given views with suspicion the cultivation of page of it. But our main contention

is that, as against the profound impres- | speare would have made him less sion created on the public mind by the interesting as a man, or have clogged Waverley novels, the criticisms which have been bestowed on such points as the above count for nothing.

We must remember that some of the most powerful writers of the day had every inducement to exert themselves to the uttermost to arrest the rising reputation of a zealous Tory; Sydney Smith and Hazlitt in particular. But if we consider that Sydney Smith was bored by Meg Merrilies and Dominie Sampson, and that he actually pronounced Clara Mowbray vulgar, we shall cease to wonder that he, at all events, failed to check the rising tide. Hazlitt was the most dangerous critic that the Waverleys ever encountered, for, like Ivanhoe in the lists at Ashby, he aimed at the helmet, "a mark more difficult to hit, but which, if attained, rendered the shock more irresistible." Had Hazlitt hit the mark, Sir Walter would certainly have been unhorsed; but he, too, missed his aim, and left his adversary unharmed.

the play of human passion by the accessories required to denote his nationality? Hazlitt seems to have wished us to believe that, instead of relying on human nature in general, Scott built up his personages out of particular circumstances or incidents with which he was himself acquainted, either by reading or tradition; that he leaned on them as on a crutch, and could not have moved without them. It would, perhaps, be a sufficient answer to this objection to point to the infinite variety of conditions under which Scott's knowledge of the human heart is exhibited, showing that he is tied down to no one age or no one station in life for the display of his highest powers. But is not Hazlitt here overlooking the obvious distinction between a novel and a play? What the one shows us in action, the other must relate in words. We want no description of Macbeth's castle, costume, or retinue, because we see them on the stage before us. We can know nothing of Osbaldistone Hall or Tillietudlem Castle but what we read upon the printed page.

Hazlitt attacked Scott on the ground that he had no "invention," and, as he owned that he detested him, has strained his ingenuity to the utmost to make a case against him. But what do Brt the real question to be asked is, we mean by "invention"? Do we whether his characters are human ; mean the power of creating something whether they live, breathe, and move; which the world has never seen or and whether we do not see the workheard of by the innate force of our own ing of passion in them as clearly as in imagination, unaided by external cir- Shakespeare, illustrated, and not obcumstances? or do we mean the com- scured, by the framework in which bination of materials with which the they are set? Will any one pretend to history of mankind and the knowledge say that in Elspeth Mucklebackit, Meg of human nature supply us in such Merrilies, Bois-Guilbert, Rashleigh Osforms and under such conditions as to baldistone, Redgauntlet, Ravenswood, strike the reader with the force of nov- John Mowbray, the true purpose of elty? Hazlitt could hardly have meant tragedy is in any way frustrated by the the former; and if he did, we know of nature or origin of the machinery no poet or dramatist, ancient or mod- through which it is developed? Are ern, who could stand the test. If he we any the worse for the touches of meant the latter, on what grounds does local color and social manners which he deny invention to Sir Walter Scott? Scott throws into the picture? And Nobody, he says, would know merely if we are not the worse, we are the from the text whether Lear was an better. Hazlitt asserts that Scott could English king or not. He is simply a not have invented imaginary scenes or king and a father. What then? Where situations. But who does invent such is the merit of this, unless by repre- in any other sense than that in which senting him as an English king, Shake-Scott did? The duel scene in " Wood

stock," the dungeon scene in "The they are deficient. Scott seems to surBetrothed," the prison scene in "Rob vey society from a loftier standpoint, Roy," and scores of others besides to range over the world of strife and those which we have quoted, are purely passion at a higher elevation, than imaginary, unless the word is to be ordinary writers, and to escape from limited to what nobody in the world everything that is noxious in his dehas ever dreamed of, read of, or heard of before, in which case the result would probably be something monstrous. Shakespeare did not evolve King Lear from his inner consciousness. He, too, was indebted to what he had read and heard. But we do not care to insist on this point. Characters must unfold themselves in some scenes or situations, whatever they may be, and there is no reason why they should not be as forcibly depicted in scenes indecency. There is nothing nambywhich are not purely imaginary as in those which are. Hazlitt tries the novel by a false test, and it would not condemn the Waverleys even were it true.

scriptions even of vice, by the height from which he looks down upon it. Closely akin to this claim on our veneration is his great natural purity, quite another thing from the manufactured article to be found in Lord Lytton's later novels, and possessing a very different flavor. The quality which we mean is as widely remote from anything like squeamishness or prudishness as it is from coarseness or

pamby, nothing "goody goody," no nonsense, no false delicacy, about Sir Walter Scott. He calls a spade a spade, and writes like a man of the world who knows what goes on in the world, and does not trouble himself, like some later writers of great emiuence, to conciliate the British matron. Yet has Scott ever written a single line calculated to raise an evil thought in the mind of either man or woman? "The Heart of Midlothian," and "St. Ronan's Well" as Scott originally wrote it, are tales of seduction, yet the purity of the author's mind keeps at

"The immortal deeds of heroes and of kings were performed on this earth; and unless we deny the faculty of invention to all such painters, poets, and dramatists as derive their materials from history, we cannot deny it to Scott. Ruskin, who in "Modern Painters" appears at first sight to favor Hazlitt's view, answers both Hazlitt and himself in "The Stones of Venice," where he sets up a position ex-bay every voluptuous image which actly the reverse of Hazlitt's; namely, that invention may be as much displayed in the grouping and arrangement of historical materials as in the management of those which are the exclusive product of our own imagination. He insists also in the same passage on the great value of "costume," contending that in "Ivanhoe," "The Talisman," "The Lac of the Lake," the accessories are a powerful and perfectly legitimate source of attraction; and he adds that this is equally true of the Iliad.

To appreciate works of imagination we must possess some imagination ourselves, and there are persons in the world who possess none. But even these may understand and value other qualities in Scott that do not make the same demand on a faculty in which

might otherwise intrude, and preserves the whole narrative as free from any taint of suggestion as if it had been written by a child. Elsewhere Scott has placed young girls in perilous and equivocal positions, without a word either to startle innocence or offend the most scrupulous modesty. The difficulty of handling these subjects without doing either may be understood by reference to other modern writers who have ventured on them, some of whom at all events cannot possibly be suspected of any indifference to such results.

The style of the Waverleys is not what the eighteenth-century critics would have called a very correct style, nor was Scott, as we have elsewhere said, a fastidious artist in words. He was at little pains to avoid either loose

constructions, frequent repetitions, or | The influence of the Waverley novels the conclusion of periods and para-operated in two directions. They congraphs on a weak or unemphatic note. |tributed powerfully to the growth of Yet the effect which Scott desires to that younger Toryism from whose loins produce is never impaired by these sprang the powerful and popular Conblemishes. He is always easy and servative party of the present day; and natural, qualities which help us over an they prepared the soil for the recepoccasional solecism more readily than a tion of that Anglo-Catholic revival style of greater artifice and precision. which, with all its errors, has been He never descends to the ordinary the salvation of the English Church. tricks of rhetoric, but in his rare ex- When we sider the magnitude of cursions into the domain of figurative the issues at stake, the intets, both eloquence he attains the highest eleva- temporal and spiritual, in defence of tion. In the effect produced by natu- which these two forces are combined; ral ease in contrast to more elaborate when we think of the influence to be pomp, the reader may compare Scott's exercised on future generations by the description of the court at Whitehall in victory or defeat of either, in the "Peveril of the Peak" with that of struggle which is imminent; when we Lord Macaulay in his "History of En- think of all that Scott may have been gland." With all its varieties Scott's instrumental in saving for us, and, if style is always strong, if not uniformly elegant. As Dr. Portman said of Pendennis, he writes like a gentleman, if not like a scholar; like a cultivated man of the world, if not like a student of composition, while we must always remember that, when in the vein, he writes also like a poet.

Stat Capitolium. As all past attempts to dethrone the Waverley novels from the eminence to which they were raised by popular acclamation have been complete failures, such, we may safely predict, will be the fate of all future efforts. The national character and the national taste may of course undergo changes which we do not now foresee, destroying those elements in both by which the general appreciation of the Waverleys has been sustained for more than sixty years. But in the absence of any such moral or intellectual revolution, the great historic dramas, with the pictures of life and manners, which Sir Walter unfolded before his countrymen, will lose their hold upon them only with the loss of civilization.

As far as the greatness of any writer is to be measured by the effect which he produces on his own age, Scott in modern times has had but one equal, if indeed he has had that, - namely, Carlyle. When Macaulay spoke of the harm which Scott had done, this is what he meant. The harm is the good.

the evil day must come at last, of the long respite he has gained for us; when we look back on the sixty years' war, and note the varying fortunes of the fight, the advance, the retreat, the surging assault, the obstinate defence, and reflect how much the cause of faith and loyalty and order has owed throughout to the genius of Sir Walter Scott; those who fight under that ancient banner may perhaps think that we have not done wrong in choosing a moment like the present for laying a fresh chaplet on his shrine.

From Temple Bar.

YOUNG LOVE.

IT was after dark on a November evening. A young woman came down the main street of a small town in the south of Scotland. She was a maidservant, about thirty years old; she had a pretty, though rather strongfeatured, face, and yellow, silken hair. When she came toward the end of the street she turned into a small draper's shop. A middle-aged woman stood behind the counter folding her wares.

"Can you tell me the way to Mistress Macdonald's ?" asked the maid.

"You'll be a stranger." It was evident that every one in those parts knew the house inquired for.

The maid had a somewhat forward, | vants, except that there's Dr. Robert. familiar manner; she sat down to rest. "What like is she?"