CHAPTER XXVII.

THE MASTER OF THE NOVEL.

E come, while admiring Scott's poetry, to speak of his prose with greater plea

sure, because, while exhibiting all the finer traits of his verse, it manifests qualities not to be found in it, and which serve to bring out better the strength, breadth, richness, and originality of his genius.

Surely those were halcyon days for Scotland; and though then a boy of ten or eleven, we remember the latter portion of them well, and watched them as closely as we would do now, when twice or thrice every year it was announced: ‘A new novel by the author of Waverley may be expected.' What interest was excited! What an almost, yea, altogether audible smacking of lips was heard! What speculations were started about the probable era of history to be embraced, or

particular portion of country to be described! How many were saying, 'Will he give us a novel on Wallace by and by, supplanting the small swipes of Miss Porter, and forming a pendant to his picture of Bruce in the Lord of the Isles?' Not a few in the country districts of Scotland were asking, 'Will he fix the scene this time in our county, or, oh joy! in our native parish?' If an elderly gentleman, with tall, rather clumsy form, white hair, and a little lame withal, were seen prowling about the environs of a Highland village, the rumour instantly ran, 'This is the Great Unknown studying for his next novel.' (We knew a case where the name of Walter Scott and a grey head, possessed by a dissenting preacher, a very worthy man, but one of the dullest dogs that ever barked in a pulpit, had nearly procured for him the freedom of a northern county town, and did, dexterously used by a wag, elicit a peal of bells on his entrance.) How proud were Perthshire and Perth when Catherine Glover stepped forth, leaning on Sir Walter Scott's stalwart arm! We remember how the quidnuncs and critics of an old Scottish village were puzzled, and even somewhat alarmed, at the possible meaning of the word 'Redgauntlet,' when it was first announced. And when each expected tale appeared, what crowding of booksellers' shops!

what enormous parcels, making the stage-coaches in those ante-railway days tremble and vibrate to and fro, and carriers' carts collapse! what copious extracts filled the papers! how critics perspired and panted in uttering words vast enough to express their admiration! and how, while Edinburgh, Glasgow, London, Paris, Copenhagen, Leipsic, Vienna, and New York were rejoicing over the humours or weeping at the pathos of the new story, the shepherd was guffawing upon the mountain side, or wiping his tears with his maud; the young maiden reading it on a garden-seat, or on her father's house stairs, with her long golden hair falling neglected over her shoulders; while the enthusiast boy, after he had waited for it for long weeks, when it did at last arrive, perhaps in the dimness of the late summer evening, when it could not be read, would take it up and clasp it to his bosom! We know something from personal observation, too, of the delight with which the better writings of Dickens, such as David Copperfield, were welcomed in London; but if they produced more laughter, we are certain they did not make such a deep and permanent impression, had not the same broad, natural interest, or the same ideal, poetical, and most romantic charm.

All this is long over. The man is long dead. The

works, stripped of their halo of novelty, must be judged of as they are in themselves, and in the severe and searching light of the new age which has risen. around us; and that test they can stand, and that light they have already borne. Often a century must elapse ere a writer attain his true niche in the temple of Fame. About half that time passed from the appearance of Milton's Paradise Lost till Addison made it popular by his criticisms in the Spectator; but Scott, though dead not forty years ago, is already a classic, has had his popularity confirmed, and his fame endorsed by the civilised world, and is as secure of his place in the future, although not precisely the same place, as Milton, Homer, and Shakspeare. Not the slightest danger of this verdict being reversed. A writer of great ability, in the Westminster Review, predicted a few years ago that the future popularity of the three principal idols of our present literary hour, Carlyle, Tennyson, and Ruskin, was precarious; and this he grounded on what he thought their imperfect and belated political and religious opinions. But whether this vaticination be true or false, it is the glory of Scott, as well as of Shakspeare and Homer, that the power of his writings is altogether irrespective of any political principles, and of aught except the broadest and most humane.

religious sentiments. He, although a Conservative by blood and training, has never, no, not in Old Mortality itself, defended tyranny, never become the devil's advocate, never entangled any esoteric or exoteric creed into his writings, never indulged in senseless outbursts against commerce, or law, or logic, or metaphysics, nor in outbursts against anything. He has identified his genius with the deep, general principles of humanity, and has learned and used a language understood and felt wherever man eats and drinks, falls and rises, sins and suffers, loves and hates; and aims at being neither a politician, nor a philosopher, nor a theologian, but at being what many politicians, philosophers, and theologians are not—a man.

In the Waverley Novels the poetic element which was in him so strongly, is held quite subordinate to that of the noble humanity and the wide reflection of all that swept across his universal soul. Scott never pauses too long on a description of nature, never dallies with a fine image; seldom, if ever, indulges in the luxury of rounding sentences merely for the sake of the euphony thereby produced. He looks at dead scenery by the side of living characters, and they must move and he must move along with them; he makes, but has not time to mount his metaphor and turn it into a