few would undervalue their judgment as critics of fine literature. And yet it is tolerably well known that they put Sir Walter on the 'inaccessible pinnacle' of Romance. Jane, whose favourite reading had hitherto been Cowper and Crabbe, lived to take delight in little beyond the Poems, but within two months of the appearance of Waverley' she declared that only Scott could have written it, and humorously complained that it was not fair that he should write novels, especially good ones, as well as poetry . . . I do not mean to like "Waverley" if I can help it, but I fear I must.'* The last two published before her death in July 1817 were 'The Black Dwarf' and Old Mortality,' and all her last year she was bravely struggling, against illness, with the sweet creations of her own delicate brain.

Thackeray paid Scott the compliment of writing on 'Ivanhoe' the most humorous and subtle of his own burlesques, picking up the idea of uniting the hero rather to Rebecca than to Rowena from that passage in Scott's own Introduction in which he defends his own conclusion of the tale. The sturdy Hazlitt, little given to swimming with any popular stream, and a Whiggish abhorrer of Scott's own political views, lavished all his acute critical powers in praise of the Novels. To come nearer our own time, Andrew Lang, being a borderer, may be supposed to have been partial, but it would be difficult to find a professional critic whose judgments have been more generally accepted by the wise; and this is what he wrote in his 'History of English Literature':† 'The eyes are dimmed as these words are penned ; so potent is the spell of that rich, kind genius, that noble character, over the hearts of those who love and honour the great and good Sir Walter.'

As the boy of Branksome threatened to call on the three champions of his House to come to his rescue, let us call on those we have mentioned, from both sides of the Tweed and now, alas, from the safer side of the Styx also, to break a lance for the honour of the father of British Romance. Nay, let us reinforce them by yet another lance, one who passed the river but the other

Life and Letters of J. A.' by W. and R. A. Austen Leigh, 1913, p. 359. † Pp. 540-4. Vol. 244.-No. 483.

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day, W. P. Ker, sternest if tenderest of critics, greatest among the Scott-lovers of our own time. His favourite was Rob Roy,' and he thought the Glasgow scenes the greatest in that story, but when he gave his matchless lecture on Sir Walter at the Sorbonne in Paris, in May 1919, the scene which he selected to quote at length was that between Dandie and Pleydell in Guy Mannering.' And we doubt not that these are champions enough, and that they will shamefully shuffle this infidel, this mis-creant (the words must be understood wholly in an Ivanhovian sense), and, at the end of the joust, will cry, 'Away with him to the deepest dungeon beneath the castle moat.'

It will not be expected of us that we should show up, much less that we should apologise for, Sir Walter's frequent mistakes, anachronisms, and absurdities, or for his clumsy use of the machinery of the supernatural: 'the German devices,' says Ker, of terror and wonder were a temptation to him, they hung about his path with their monotonous and mechanical jugglery'; but we must remember that Scott was a man of his own day, and that these imps of darkness imposed themselves also upon Goethe and Shelley. Of the Poems the greatest is easily the fullest both of amazing anachronisms and of absurdities. Gilpin Horner is worse than the oft-castigated White Lady of Avenel. Scott himself realised how badly Gilpin fitted in, and apologised, in a letter to Miss Seward, for the 'devious and desultory' course of 'The Lay,'* but he failed to see that Gilpin is also rather 'repulsive.' Yet the management of the supernatural in the scene at Michael's tomb is exceedingly fine, even as an example of pity and terror, and the poem closes with the simplest, as well as the greatest, rendering of the 'Dies Ira' that poet ever conceived:

'When shivering like a parched scroll
The flaming heavens together roll.'

And when Scott blended humour with his terror, as in 'Wandering Willie's Tale' in 'Redgauntlet,' where will you find his equal? No doubt we think it a pity that he did not trouble himself to correct really bad blunders, but left it to the ridiculous Ballantynes, who were as

* Lockhart, chap. xiii, p. 121.

incapable as they were hasty and greedy. If Homer sometimes dozed and

'Here and there disclos'd a brave neglect,'

Scott positively snores. In one passage Lockhart hints, though he hardly expresses the idea, that the influence on Scott of his own edition of Dryden was operative in leading him to neglect meticulous labour, correction, and finish; that in fact he leaped into his literary eminence with the same ease as Dryden, and was conscious and unashamed of his indifference to details.† We give, however, much credit to Mr Stalker's judgment (he being 'out for blood') that he makes so little of this point. He is, in fact, impatient to get to his last and fiercest set of indictments, the religious, the political, the social. The man whose oft-quoted last words to Lockhart were, 'My dear, be a good man, be virtuous, be religious. Nothing else will comfort you when you come to lie here,' who in the last long fading of mind and body was heard continually muttering words from Isaiah and Job and the Dies Iræ,' the man who had drawn David and Jeanie Deans, 'had no particular belief in anything except prosperity and position.' Mr Stalker forgets that a hundred pages before he had qualified this amazing proposition as follows: 'It has been said of him § that he had no conception of God, and it is partly true; but no man ever had so little need of moral or spiritual support. In his own soul were infinite peace, infinite endurance, all the resource wherewith man has met the primæval and twilight terrors of life.' This is fine, and, to support Mr Stalker, the last three lines are wholly true. But who can read the Diary,' or the closing chapters of Lockhart, without feeling how utterly untrue is the first line? Mr Stalker is in fact reading his own political views (which we conceive to be akin to those of Clydebank and Mr Kirkwood) into his opinion of Scott's religious views, as into that of his literary qualifications. Forgetful how, in speaking of Scott's generosity to, and affection for, servants, for labourers, and for all poor and suffering creatures who crossed his path, he had written This humane and

† Lockhart, chap. xvii, p. 158.

§ P. 190.

large-souled man, who was yet a stickler for rank and position, was in the nobler parts of his nature a true democrat,'* Mr Stalker sits down to compose his famous sixteenth chapter, which is intended to blast what Shakespeare called degree off the earth. In seventeen fierce pages (of which we thoroughly acknowledge that perfervidum ingenium which Sir Walter so much and so rightly dreaded in the coming generation of his countrymen) he pours scorn and hatred upon all who think in politics or religion as their ancestors did:

The heroes of the nations are nearly all scoundrels, the traditions of the peoples are one long series of misguided passions, while the call to raise up the spirit and the life of mankind sounds in the ears of men continually, and is in every generation stifled and extinguished. . . . In this orthodox frame of mind Scott lived and died . . . his soul flamed with hatred of the spiritual impulse of his day. . . . He had neither pity nor understanding of the sorrows of the industrial life that was fermenting in his day. . . he pursued with real malice' (Mr Stalker forgets that Sir Walter's duty as Sheriff was to put in force the existing laws) 'the earliest trade-unionists, and made every effort to destroy them.... We who perceive from this distance see that the social impulses and actions of Sir Walter Scott were vicious, altogether at enmity with the only righteousness of his age, the spirit of Shelley in literature, of the reforming party in politics, and of the earliest trade-unionists.' ↑

Finally, he was an epitome of mankind as it exists, and therefore a good illustration of why mankind remains as it is.'

Scott's political judgment of persons was, we think, very far from infallible; and it is strange to read that among the ministry of 1808, he thought that, 'Canning excepted, there was too much self-seeking.' He never seems to have seen through Canning at all, and the name of the greatest statesman of the age, Castlereagh, does not, we think, occur in one of Lockhart's pages.

* P. 107.

They were very far from being the earliest; unions were at least a century old, 'strikes' were known before the close of the 17th century. Sir Walter suffered in 1803 from a strike of printers' devils and papermakers, and humorously suggested to Miss Seward the notion that authors should strike against the publishers.

Lockhart, chap. xviii, p. 168.

But what Scott did see, in the year of Castlereagh's death, was that

' of the three kingdoms the English alone are qualified to mix in politics safely and without fatal results; the fierce and hasty resentments of the Irish, and the sullen, long-enduring, revengeful temper of my countrymen make such agitations have a much wider and more dreadful effect among them.'

And in 1826, he wrote to Croker the terrible and true prophecy, which may well be compared with Grattan's prophecy of the probable results of the Union of 1801:

'Scotland completely liberalised, as she is in a fair way of being, will be the most dangerous neighbour to England that she has had since 1639. There is yet time to make a stand, for there is yet a great deal of good and genuine feeling left in the country. But if you unscotch us you will find us damned mischievous Englishmen. The restless, and yet laborious and constantly watchful character of the people, their desire for speculation in politics or anything else, only restrained by some proud feeling about their own country, now become antiquated and which late measures will tend much to destroy, will make them, under a wrong direction, the most formidable revolutionists who ever took the field of innovation.'

Well might the Whig Cockburn say that Scott's sense was still more wonderful than his genius.† Burns, indeed, in 'The Author's Earnest Cry and Prayer' (1786) had, on a much smaller provocation, a similar opinion of what would happen if Scotland were 'unscotched.'

'An' Lord! if ance they pit her till 't,
Her tartan petticoat she'll kilt

An' durk an' pistol at her belt,
She'll tak the streets,

An' rin her whittle to the hilt
I' the first she meets!'

This lack of political restraint and judgment was never more glaringly displayed than during Mr Gladstone's famous 'Midlothian campaign' of 1880. The late Sir Thomas Raleigh once told the writer that, at one of the Edinburgh elections late in the last century, the most popular election speech he heard was from a man

* Lockhart, chap. lvi, p. 477.

+ Ibid, chap, xli, p. 370.