light which that poet could not command. She is more fearful in the fell passions which lurk in the blood of old age, and inspire the lips of dotage, than the witches of Macbeth; and, although with no supernaturalism about her, has a wild sublimity of thought and language more impressive still. And what exquisite humour and knowledge of Scotch character in the Post Office scene, and in the story of 'Little Davie and his pony!' Altogether, The Antiquary is a mine of the purest and richest ore. It never disappoints, and it can never be exhausted.

CHAPTER XI.

SCOTT AND THE COVENANTERS.

CARCELY had The Antiquary left its author's hands, than he planned the

Tales of my Landlord, projected a series of Letters on the History of Scotland, which were never completed, and undertook to write the historical department of the Edinburgh Annual Register. Not willing that Constable should monopolize the publication of his novels, and for certain personal reasons besides, Scott offered his new work to Murray and Blackwood. Discouraged a little by the coldness with which The Antiquary was at first received, he once thought of bringing out the Tales of my Landlord without the words 'by the Author of Waverley,' although in this he changed his mind. William Blackwood, a man of rare penetration and rough vigour of speech, found fault with the closing part of the Black Dwarf, and even

suggested another way in which he thought the story should terminate. Scott got very indignant, and wrote, saying, 'Confound his impudence! Tell him I belong to the Black Hussars of literature, who neither give nor take quarter.' This being out of Scott's usual measured style, had a proportionate effect, and told like thunder from a cloudless sky. The Tales appeared in December 1816, and the reception of the first of them showed the sagacious bibliopole was right. The Black Dwarf was thought to begin delightfully, but to come to a lame and impotent conclusion. But Old Mortality, while bearing up its weaker brother, challenged a place instantly among Scott's proudest works. In the upper literary circles of London especially its reception was rapturous. The lion and the lamb, Gifford and Lord Holland, here lay down together. The latter distinguished nobleman sate up all night to read it; 'nothing slept but his gout.'

In Scotland, too, its power was felt, but speedily a storm arose against it for its treatment of the Covenanters; a storm swelled, if not originally stirred, by Dr. M'Crie, who, in a succession of able and eloquent papers in the Edinburgh Christian Instructor, then edited by Dr. Andrew Thomson of St. George's, assailed its statements, and went nigh to impugn the integrity of its author's motives.

Scott at first resolved to remain silent; but finding the impression strong and general, he wrote a reply to the Doctor in the somewhat equivocal form of a review of his own book in the Quarterly. M'Crie's work was published separately, ran through various editions, and was in 1846 re-issued under the patronage of the Free Church General Assembly. We are disposed, looking back at the controversy, to think that the whole truth lay with neither of the contending parties; and it is our wish to steer between the Charybdis of the Quarterly Review on the one side, and the Scylla of Dr. M'Crie on the other. We do not think that Scott was animated by any intense and virulent hatred against the Covenanters, as has been supposed. All Claverhouse was not slumbering in his breast. He was a good hater, but incapable of deliberate and longdrawn malice. He had strong prejudices and passions; but neither against individuals nor parties can we conceive him cherishing slow, burning, vindictive resentment. He was attracted to the subject by its historic interest, and the opportunity it afforded him of exercising his favourite powers; and he sate down to Old Mortality, as he did to his other novels, with little definite plan or purpose, and least of all with the intention of systematically blackening the memory of any party. But, on the

other hand, it is certain that he had imbibed strong prejudices against the Covenanters, which, finding this channel open, ran too readily and recklessly along it. Scott had been brought up in the atmosphere partly of Edinburgh persiflage and scepticism, and partly of Border enthusiasm. The mixture of something of the Jeffrey and something of the Leyden element in him, with a dash besides of Highland superstition and Jacobite prejudice, rendered his own character a singular compound, and accounts for his unfitness fully to sympathize with the narrow, intense current of genuine earnestness which ran in the Presbyterian veins. Yet his enthusiasm, though very different from that of the Covenanters (being more that of personal genius, class, and country, than of cause), prevented him, along with his sense of justice, from treating them as mere subjects of scorn. His early Edinburgh training might have suggested unmitigated ridicule; but his Border blood and poetic fire interposed, and compelled him to blend with it a certain respect and admiration. Hence his novel veers to and fro in feeling. Like Balaam, he comes to curse, and remains to bless. He is, like many men of genius, overruled by the power behind him. He awakens a demon, to whom he is compelled to be obedient. The fine instinct in him works out of his original