admiring "The Lady of the Lake," was willing, by receiving Scott socially, to condone an offence he had committed in paying his respects to the Princess of Wales, when in London, some years before. When Pitt and Fox were both alive, Scott, like most other Tories of that day, patronized that lady, because she, like them, was at war with her husband, — she on personal, the others on political grounds. When the prince, as Regent, declined to put his old friends the Whigs into highest office, Scott's Toryism rejoiced. It was not until March, 1815, however, that the Regent made Scott's personal acquaintance, with which he professed, and indeed appeared, to be highly gratified. From that time, Scott never visited London without being the Regent's guest, there or at Wind

sor.

In August, 1813, the office of poet-laureate becoming vacant, it was offered to Scott. His first impulse was to decline it, though he believed that its income was three hundred to four hundred pounds a year; but, on consultation with the Duke of Buccleugh, he determined, having sixteen hundred pounds a year from two other public offices, not to accept a third, whose smaller emolument might do real service to some poorer brother of the Muses. He respectfully declined the proffered office, and recommended Southey as suitable for it. This appointment was made; the Prince Regent sensibly agreeing that the birthday ode, a lyric of high-flown adulation, wedded to machine-made music, which had been omitted since the illness of George III., should hereafter be entirely dispensed with.

The Duke of Buccleugh's advice to Scott, on the laureateship, was partly based on the fact that the office was stamped ridiculous by the general concurrence of the world, and that Walter Scott, poet-lau

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THE LAUREATESHIP.

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reate, would cease to be Walter Scott of "The Lay," "Marmion," &c. Yet it had been held by Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, John Dryden, and Thomas Warton; and, in our own time, by Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, and Alfred Tennyson.

CHAPTER XIII.

Novel-Reading and Novel-Writing. - Prose Fictions before Scott.-"Waver ley" resumed and published. Authorship concealed. - Suspicion points to Scott.-Lighthouse Voyage. -Thomas Scott. Miss Edgeworth's Lost - Letter.-Miss Mitford's Criticism. — Dugald Stewart.

1814.

EFORE Scott had given over writing long poems,

in which he obtained higher and more permanent fame than that which he had won as a minstrel. Many persons have scarcely read his poetical romances; but who is not familiar with the Waverley novels?

As great a novel-reader as Lord Brougham, Lord Lyndhurst, and Daniel O'Connell (the last of whom once declared to me that the advantages of steam, as applied to travelling on sea and land, were counterbalanced by the abridgment of the time he used to devote to the perusal of works of fiction), Walter Scott saw, before he began to write, that the novels. and romances of the present century, and particularly at its commencement, were unsuited to the changed condition of society in his own time. The dramatists of the Elizabethan age produced stories, historical or comic, which, two centuries later, would probably have appeared in prose as historical romances, or novels of society. In an age when readers were few, the tales acted on the stage were the prin

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cipal popular sources of intellectual enjoyment. For a long time after the death of Shakspeare, the drama may be said to have fallen into abeyance. Thirty or forty years of civil strife, during which imaginative literature was at a discount, followed the death of Shakspeare; and, though there was a revival of the drama between the Restoration in 1660 and the Revolution in 1688, little effective in that line was presented until Dryden bade the dry bones live. Bunyan's immortal "Pilgrim's Progress," in this time, was the favorite reading of the people; and the "Decameron" of Boccaccio, Rabelais' comic and satiric adventures of "Gargantua and Pantagruel," and Cervantes' wonderful "Don Quixote," became well known in England through translations. So, at a later period, were the Abbé Prévost's "Manon l'Escaut" (like the younger Dumas' "La Dame aux Camélias," the apotheosis of a professional impure), Rousseau's "Nouvelle Héloïse," Le Sage's "Gil Blas" and "Le Diable Boiteux," Voltaire's "Candide and Zadig," St. Pierre's "Paul and Virginia," Goethe's "Sorrows of Werther," and a few other foreign works.

When the seventeenth century opened, the gross novels of Mrs. Aphra Behn, which had delighted the gay and careless courtiers of the closing years of the Stuart dynasty, fell into disrepute. The age of Queen Anne, which has been entitled the Augustan, exhibited comparative decency, at least in its prose fiction; and under the new dynasty, though not quite so scrupulous (for the first two Guelphic sovereigns were themselves unmistakably immoral in their domestic and social relations), public taste became improved. De Foe's "Robinson Crusoe," which does not contain a single impure incident or expression, speedily obtained a popularity which it still enjoys. Swift's "Gulliver," a political fiction, which is a

satire on human nature, also had (and has) a multitude of readers, who, opening it merely to be entertained by the wonderful adventures it contains, narrated with a most artistic vraisemblance, scarcely notice its too prevailing coarseness. Richardson and Fielding, however, may rank as the inventors of the English novel, though not of its higher class, the historical. There runs an under-current of indelicacy, not very decided, but adapted to the sensuous taste of the time, through Richardson's sentimentality; and yet the author of "Pamela" and "Clarissa Harlowe" affected to be a purist in morals. Next to him is Fielding, who had begun as a satirical parodist, and ended by establishing a new school of story-tellers, who rejoiced in what Scott has called "warmth of description." Fielding, with all his faults, possessed genius, and was followed by Smollett, who photographed the manners and exhibited the vices of many grades of society. Sterne, decidedly a man of genius, was not restrained from gross indelicacy by a sense of what was due to his office as a clergyman. Oliver Goldsmith, whose "Vicar of Wakefield," much as all readers admire it, has serious defects in construction and sentiment, might have produced a real novel of English society, but "died too soon," when Scott was only three years old. Horace Walpole's "Castle of Otranto," written in 1763, was its author's solitary work of fiction, and owed as much at least to his rank as to novelty of design or execution. Clara Reeve's Gothic romance, "The Old English Baron," alone remembered out of her many works, was an almost avowed imitation of Walpole's romantic story, and a decided improvement upon it.

When Scott wrote the first chapters of " Waverley," in 1805, the principal living novelist was Mrs. Radcliffe, whose very sensational romances outdid all con