full, as it was a final exponent of his religious sentiments, his deviations from the orthodox creed were exceedingly slight, and his general belief in Christianity seems never to have been shaken. We have quoted above his significant and earnest dying words to Lockhart. We are not prepared to deny that he had somewhat strong prejudices against what is called the Evangelical School, that he disliked very pious females, and that no more than Jonathan Oldbuck was he a regular attender on church but he paid, on the whole, a satisfactory homage to the Sabbath, always spending a portion of that day in religious exercises and the instruction of his children; he believed as well as admired the Bible, and religious reverence was indeed an essential part of his constitution. How his views and feelings might have been modified in our strange, faith-shattering, or rather faith-shifting days,—days in which, perhaps, after all, faith is gaining in breadth what it is losing in intensity; less drying up than changing its channel,-cannot, of course, be either stated or surmised. But, without contending for the evangelical character of any of his works in the strict sense of that term, we maintain that no one who had not drunk into the very depth of the spirit of Christianity could have created a Jeanie Deans. He did not, indeed, create,

he only copied her from many living examples he had met with among the Christian women of his native land; but unless he had admired and understood, he would not have condensed these examples into this consummate one, or would have dared— and in that age it required some daring-to make Rebecca the Jewess the finest character and the truest Christian in the most brilliant of all his tales, and put into her lips that noble strain which ranks almost beside the old Psalms of David:

'When Israel, of the Lord beloved,

Out from the land of bondage came,
Her fathers' God before her moved,
An awful Guide in cloud and flame.
'By day along the astonished lands
The cloudy pillar glided slow,
By night Arabia's crimsoned sands
Returned the fiery column's glow.
'There rose the choral hymn of praise,

And trump and timbrel answered keen,
And Zion's daughters poured their lays,

And priests' and warriors' voice between ;'

or could have sustained throughout his numerous tales that general respect for the institutions and the ministers of religion, that reverence for the Scriptures, or that all-embracing charity, which so distinguish his every page. He that is not against us is on our part, says the Founder of Christianity Himself; and His words, we venture

to say, may be applied fearlessly to the author of the Waverley Novels.

Old Mortality, all may remember, spent his life in visiting the tombs of the martyrs; and there exists at least one remarkable man of the day who might earn the name of 'New Mortality' from a similar habit. We refer to the author of the Life of Chalmers in the present series. The tendency, however, is rather now-a-days to repair to the tombs of the poets. It has been at least our own fortune to have stood at some of the most celebrated of the resting-places of the renowned. Years ago we visited the mausoleum which, in Dumfries,

'Directs pale Scotia's way

To pour her sorrows o'er her poet's dust,'

with many conflicting emotions, as we remembered how much power and weakness lay buried there; although the feeling left last and uppermost was that expressed in the words,

'The glory dies not, and the grief is past.'

Some time after we visited Wordsworth's grave, as evening was dropping her dewy curtain over Grasmere Lake, and the Rotha, blue darling of her poet's eye, was softening her voice amidst the stillness, and the New Moon had suddenly shone out in the west, as if to certify the immortality of his song and himself, and to cut with her silver

sickle whatever doubts as to either might have been crossing our souls. A year or two later we visited the grave of Southey, with Derwentwater spreading out her beautiful bosom on the left; Portinscale, the loveliest of English villages, laughing through roses in the foreground; and old Skiddaw standing up like the poet's everlasting monument behind. But none of these visits moved us more than when, one splendid September forenoon in 1859, we stood in Dryburgh Abbey, and leaned over the tomb of Scott, with a vast yew that might have formed a coronet for the head of Death shadowing it, and the sound of the Tweed-the sound of all others sweetest in the ear of the mighty Wizard-coming up through the woodland as a lullaby to his dust; and thus leaning and musing there, thought of the benign creations of that man's mind; of the stores of knowledge it had accumulated; of the entire literature which had emanated from it; and of the intellectual, moral, and purely and loftily spiritual influences which that literature had produced, was producing, and would produce for evermore;—we felt as if a multitude of men, as if a nation were slumbering below, and, full of blended awe and love, turning away, we left him alone with his glory!

CONCLUSION.

AV

THE COMING CENTENARY.

E cannot close this brief and imperfect, but not, we trust, inaccurate or insincere life of Sir Walter Scott without a very few closing words in reference to the centenary of his birth which is at hand.

The time draws nigh when Scotland is to do herself and her most gifted son the honour of a centenary celebration; and certainly, if it exhibit the loyalty and enthusiasm, or even a portion of it, which saluted that of Robert Burns, it will add a lustre and a laurel to the year 1871 that shall render it only second to the year 1771, when the great Minstrel of the Border and the prose Shakspeare of Scotland appeared in the metropolis of his native land.

We use the words 'a portion of it' advisedly, for we are aware that there were circumstances connected