pound of the fierce, careless warrior, and the refined and gallant knight. Few readers, we suspect, lay down Old Mortality without a deeper detestation for the dancing bear, the educated tiger, the handsome and accomplished murderer, which is all, in reality, the author makes him out to be.

Yet if in some parts of this novel no one has caricatured the Covenanters more severely, none has brought out their picturesque aspects with such felicity and force. None but Scott could have described that scene in the inn, where Burley overthrows Bothwell; or that profounder scene in the barn, where, on the old sleeping homicide's brow, the sweat-drops of a great agony are standing like 'bubbles on the late disturbed stream,' as the tragedy of Magus Muir is being re-enacted in his soul; or the skirmish of Drumclog; or the tent-preaching which succeeded; or the rout of Bothwell; or the torture scene; or the shaggy mountain solitude where Burley found his last desperate retreat, retiring from the company of men to that of devils, and who can match, in the fierce passions of his own breast, that 'hell of waters' which is perpetually thundering around him. It sometimes happens that a caricature is more forcible, more life-like, more characteristic than a picture, especially if the countenance be

strongly marked. And so, probably, Scott has to many given an impression of the rough energy, the honesty, the daring, and the zeal of the Covenanters, which a tamer and more friendly portraiture could never have produced. These concessions of an enemy are confessedly more valuable than the ex parte statements of a friend. And still more, when an enemy is transcendently powerful, may his reluctant testimony, and the rude, careless grandeur of his touch, be more effectual than all the pleadings and reclamations of weaker advocates on the other side.

A modified sentence is that, therefore, of wisdom. Few can think Old Mortality a strictly accurate or fair account of its age; and few, on the other hand, would be disposed to erase it as a blot from the list of its author's works. It is a great partisan production, like the histories of Clarendon and Hume. Like them, it must always be read, but like them, too, should be read with great caution, and with the addition of not a few grains of salt.

M'Crie's reply was also partisan. He would scarcely admit that the Covenanters committed an error, or, if he did yield an inch of ground, it was after a struggle like that of Morton and Burley when they kept Bothwell Brigg. He weakened the effect, too, by commencing with an underestimate of the genius and works of his opponent,

in this case a signal error. He speaks, for instance, rather coldly of Guy Mannering, contemptuously of The Antiquary, and admits little literary merit in the book he was answering. Still his reply was vigorous and eloquent. He carried the war, too, with triumphant success into the enemy's camp; and, by way of counterpoise to Scott's caricatures of Presbyterian preaching, quoted from Episcopalian divines of the same period specimens of bathos profounder still, of a more adventurous nonsense, of silliness and stupidity more unique, and of prejudice, bigotry, and blindness far more total and hopeless.

Old Mortality was and yet was not answered. Where it grossly offended against truth and fact, its errors were now exposed; but its powerful pictures of an enthusiasm which sometimes erred, and of a zeal and energy which often mistook or missed their mark, remained intact, and are as immortal as the memory of the Covenant itself. The controversy on the subject did much good. It attracted attention to a topic and a time which had been allowed, in a great measure, to drop from the minds of men, and it poured a flood of light upon a field over which thick mists were beginning to gather, and yet which had been one of the noblest in the history of Scotland or of the Church of Christ.

CHAPTER XII.

CONTINUED SUCCESS, WITH PRELIMINARY

S

SHADOWS.

COTT, to a mind of gigantic power united a tall and massive bodily frame

work. Goethe, he was prodigiously struck with his personal appearance, his majestic stature, stately gait, noble forehead, and great flashing eyes,—his whole aspect combining the fire of a poet with the dignity of a prince. The conqueror of Italy, the hero of Marengo, Lodi, and Austerlitz, felt himself small in the presence of the author of Werter and Faust, and exclaimed, 'Vous êtes homme!'-You are a man. And although Scott had not the ideal physiognomy or the perfect figure of the great German, yet there was something in his pile of forehead, the curtained lightning of his eye, and the gruff sagacity of his lower

When the first Napoleon met

face, in which Napoleon, who was a great observer, and looked quite through the deeds of men, would have owned a true type of manhood, and granted that, if there were more splendour and subtlety in Goethe, there was in Scott quite as much strength, and a vast deal more simplicity. There was enough about him, at least, soul and body combined, to awaken (if the pagan poets are to be believed) in the gods the envy they feel at the superior mortals, and to start Apollonic shafts against a mark so conspicuous and so broad. It was on the body that the arrow was first to alight; the mind was for more than another decade to be spared.

He had made himself the easier prey by the incessant labours in which he had been occupied, alternating with many social engagements. Against the effects of all this, while in the country, air and exercise hardened him; but it was otherwise in the town. And in the town, accordingly, the first blow fell. On the 5th March 1817, at the close of a joyous party in Castle Street, he was seized with severe cramp in the stomach, and had to retire from the room, as he himself describes it, 'roaring like a bull-calf.' Such attacks yielded readily enough to medicine at first, but they recurred at intervals for more than two years,