novels? So anxious was Sir Walter to do justice to the memory of his brother, that he goes out of his way in order to append to his General Preface the story on which Thomas Scott proposed to found the tale of Canadian Life, which years before he had been recommended by his brother to compose. Let any one read the pathetic language in which Sir Walter refers to "the best loved and the best deserving to be loved" of his brothers; let him remark the kindness with which he recalls every incident connected with the "loved and lost," who "died 'before his day' in a distant and foreign land," and he will find no difficulty in estimating at its proper value Mr. Fitzpatrick's contribution to the history of our literature; he will find no difficulty in vindicating to his own mind the intellectual glory and the moral excellence of Sir Walter Scott.

The disposition to disparage departed genius, the inclination to clip "the laurels that overhang its grave,' is no new phenomenon. It was thus that the most tragic of the tragedians of Athens was said to have been assisted in his literary labours by Socrates. It was thus that the Latin Menander was said to have been aided by Scipio and Lælius. It is thus that the voice of the greatest of epic poets is pronounced to be "the voice of many waters." In our own times this spirit of depreciation and disparagement has taken still more offensive forms. The question immortalised in comedy has been elevated into a literary question, and men gravely ask, "Who wrote Shakspeare?" It is in the same spirit we are now asked to pronounce, "Who wrote the earlier Waverley novels?" "It has often seemed to me, and I believe to others," says Mr. Fitzpatrick," that the seventyfour volumes of the Waverley novels could hardly have been the work of Sir Walter Scott's pen exclusively." But is the marvel diminished by supposing three Sir Walter Scotts, each with a spirit so marvellously attuned to symphony as to produce a single sound? "Some of these masterpieces of fictitious narrative," we are told, "appeared in such rapid succession, that the mere manual labour of transcribing could not have been accomplished by any ordinary

writer in the time." Is the mystery solved by the supposition of a double voyage across the waters of the Atlantic? Written they were and transcribed they were, and in rapid succession they appeared. This is the undisputed fact. Why should we attempt to remove the difficulty by supposition heaped on supposition, when the only effect of all these accumulated hypotheses is simply to double the difficulty that they were fabricated to explain?

In the case of Scott, the marvellous fertility which is the chief characteristic of genius of the highest order, is perhaps less an object of marvel than in the case of any other author upon record. The works of a great novelist are the reflex of his own actual experience, and in the case of Scott we know what his actual experiences were. His first consciousness of existence was identified with the old border fortalice of Smailholm. The stories with which his childhood was delighted were stories of Culloden, and the tales with which his grandmother solaced the winter evenings, were tales of Watt of Harden, and Wight Willie of Aikwood. While yet a boy, he had formed a juvenile intimacy with Captain Dalgetty, and paced along the shingles of Prestonpans in company with Jonathan Oldbuck of Monkbarns. He had enjoyed the society of men who had been out in the '15 and the '45, and fought duels with Rob Roy. In his father's house and office he had met with all the characters in Redgauntlet-nay, he himself had pleaded in the case of Peter Peebles. While yet a lad, he had gone through the whole cycle of British romance literature-he had exhausted the Bibliotheque Blue and the Bibliotheque de Romans-he had acquired a similar intimacy with Dante, Boiardo, Pulci, and all the romance of Italy. Gentleman, lawyer, county magistrate, cavalry volunteer, and solitary student, he passed through all phases of existence-all phases of experience were to him familiar. Add to this, that so strong was the impulse to romance that existed within him, that even in his schoolboy days his tales used to assemble an admiring audience around the fire-side, and happy was he that could sit next to the inexhaustible

narrator. It was the same during the period of his apprenticeship to the law. It was his great amusement amid the solitudes of Arthur's seat and Salisbury crags to interchange with one chosen friend a series of legends in which both the martial and the miraculous predominated. It was no wonder, therefore, that in mature manhood the accumulated stores of tradition, reading, and imagination, preserved under the guardianship of a portentous memory, were poured forth with an inexhaustible profusion, at which the world was smitten with amazement.

But the romances with which the name of Scott is imperishably identified, were not only characterised by a large and diversified experience they were characterised also by a high and peculiar style of genius. Scott was of imagination all compact;" but his was not the imagination of Midsummer Night's Dream-the imagination that

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Bodies forth

The forms of things unknown.

It was rather an imagination, which, if we may employ the words of Schiller, exerted itself in

Clothing the palpable and the familiar In golden exhalations of the dawn.

ex

The great novelist, in fact, could have appropriated only one-half of the panegyric which Johnson passed upon the great dramatist. He " hausted old worlds," but he cannot be said to have "imagined new." The scenes of the actual world, whether past or present, there was no one who could depict with more fidelity and force. But he failed miserably when he aimed at the ideal. His Goblin Page is a mere abortion; his White Lady of Avenel, the shadow of a shade. Compare these with the Puck, the Ariel, the Oberon, and the Titania of Shakspeare, and the inferiority of Scott is at once apparent. Hence it was that Coleridge said of the Undine of De la Motte Fouque, that it had given him what the Waverley novels had failed to give-a new idea. But to rebuild and repeople a feudal castle--to resuscitate ancient manners and ancient modes of thought-to develope the humours

of those with whom he was familiarly acquainted-to depict the habits of those by whom he was constantly surrounded-to seize on evanescent traits of character, and embody real incidents and traditions in a world of fiction-these were the feats in the performance of which his genius excelled, and in the execution of which he stands without a rival. Of the creative imagination of Shakspeare and Milton he had little; of the idealizing imagination of Shelley and Wordsworth still less; but of what we may call representative or reproductive imagination he possessed a power which has never been equalled in diversity and range, and if equalled in vividness and force, has only been equalled in the case of Homer.

Scott, it is true, during the whole of his literary career was occupied with business and participated in the pleasures of society. But his works are not only the triumph of genius-they are the triumph of systematic labour and indomitable will. Simple in his habits and rigidly moral in his life, no dissipation had power to distract his energies. Concentrating the whole force of his character on a given point, he was ready at a moment's warning to transfer it to another. In the cool of the morning before others had risen-in the intervals of business when others were unemployed-in the shades of the evening when others had retired to rest-such were the periods which even amid the distractions of business and the duties of hospitality the great Romancer was able to consecrate to the Genius of Romance. When dressing in the morning, his ever active mind was occupied with the literary task of the day. While superintending the progress of his plantations and reclining on some grassy bank, he had the new romance, to use his own felicitous expression, still "simmering" in his brain. Even the lassitude of illness, the agonies of pain had no power over the iron will of this indomitable man. When racked with spasms and drugged with opium, he still had power, not to write, but to dictate to John Ballantyne or William Laidlaw that most tragic of Romances, the Bride of Lammermoor; and we know from the testimony of his amanuensis that the

most impassioned scenes in Ivanhoe were extemporised while he walked up and down the room, overmastered by his own enthusiasm, till paroxysms of pain compelled him for the moment to desist.

But the phenomenon which appears so marvellous to critics of a certain stamp is, after all, only in strict accordance with the general analogy of genius. It is scarcely going too far to say that the greatest triumphs of contemplation have been effected by men who have been immersed in the distractions of active life. Take for instance, "Rome's least mortal mind," the consul Cicero. No sooner had his education been completed under the philosophers of Athens, than he was at once precipitated into the vortex of the politics of Rome. As jurisconsult and advocate, no plodding lawyer had a more extensive practice at the bar. Step after step, each in its own peculiar year, he attained the highest offices in the commonwealth. He conducted state prosecutions that rivalled that of Hastings; he was the soul of debates that exceeded the stormiest discussions in the British parliament. He had been the chief magistrate of Rome; he had quelled a great conspiracy against the state; he had been hailed as the father of his country. During the whole of his mature manhood he had been the organ of a great political party, and finally he fell a victim to political revenge. No man in short ever lived a more active or a stormier existence; yet what secluded man of letters ever bequeathed to posterity a prouder monument of contemplative genius? All that ancient philosophy can boast of lofty or profound is to be discovered in his philosophical remains. Not only did he reduce his own great masterpieces of political and forensic eloquence to writing-he developed the theory of eloquence in his Dialogues on the Orator. He composed a treatise on the philosophy of politics; he composed a work on

natural Religion. Even poetry and criticism in turn engaged the energies of his ever-active mind, and a history of his own times was one of his multifarious literary projects. Or take a still more illustrious example. No indefatigable schoolman, no phlegmatic professor of philology ever left behind more voluminous remains than Bacon. The De Augmentis and the Novum Organum, marking as they do an era in the history of human progress, might of themselves have constituted the labour of a life. His essays comprise all the curious learning of Montaigne, and all the acute observation of La Rochefoucauld, combined with a profundity of thought and an elevation of tone to which neither Montaigne nor La Rochefoucauld could lay the slightest claim. To recapitulate all his other works-philosophical, legal, political, and historicalwould be a useless labour. Four folio volumes, the embodiment of the most extensive learning, the most profound meditation, the most brilliant wit, might well be considered as the measure and complement of a wellfilled literary life. But this voluminous writer was no mere man of letters, no cloistered sage, no s>cluded academic from the banks of the Isis or the Cam. From law student to Lord High Chancellor, he ha 1 gone through all the gradations of the most laborious of professions. Lawyer, courtier, statesman, and man of the world, he was essentially a man of action. How, then, did it happen that this man of action became the leader of the great intellectual reformation-the Luther of philosophy? The question is easily answered. An active intellect can find no rest except in change of action. The alternation of action, instead of proving an impediment, in reality proves a stimulus and an excitement. A great intellect, in a word, is as restless as the sea, and its very calm has its own internal motion.