Sir Walter Scott. 45 i 



appears quite certain, that, if Scott the poet had never changed his 

 metier and become the prolific parent of some twenty or thirty 

 highly popular romances, his name would long ere this have been 

 consigned to the tomb of all the Capulets, and his memory would 

 be preserved only in the pages of the old Edinburgh and Quarterly 

 Reviews. But Scott has lived and will live ; and the sun of his 



ory as a writer of fiction has reflected its rays on his poems the 

 ess brilliant and less successful labours of his youth. Some of our 

 headers may be inclined to dissent from the opinion that we have 

 just advanced and to charge us with illiberality in thus unfavour- 

 ably criticising the illustrious dead : but truth must be told, and we 

 fearlessly appeal to the candid and competent for the confirmation 

 of our allegations. The more pleasant task remains of speaking to 

 his excellencies as the first of modern romancers the father of a 

 school peculiar and distinct in its character a pattern for the imita- 

 tion of a host of more humble and less talented aspirants. 

 A It would require far greater space and a more laborious reading 

 of Sir Walter Scott's prose works than we can give or would wish to 

 give, to analyze very minutely his qualifications for the station that 

 he undoubtedly holds. The works on which his fame chiefly rests 

 ^re Waverly, the Antiquary, Old Mortality, The Heart of Midlo- 

 thian, Rob-Roy, Ivanhoe, and Kenilworth ; and to these exclusively 

 shall we refer for illustrations in proof of what we may advance con- 

 cerning the intellectual qualities of their author. 



Sir Walter Scott could have done nothing, if he had trusted solely 

 to his own mental resources to his own powers of penetrating cha- 

 racter. He has written an admirable eulogy of Richardson ; but 

 if he had taken the author of Clarissa Harlowe for his pattern, he 

 would have failed most miserably, for he would then have brought 

 his own superficiality into immediate contact with the keen, masterly, 

 and philosophical penetration of human character, which none pos- 

 sessed, to an equal degree, with the greatest novelist of the last 

 century. The author of ' Waverly ' was conscious of his own intel- 

 lectual defects and weaknesses, and needed no ill-natured reviewer 

 to point them out to him. The paths of Fielding, Smollett, Le Sage, 

 and Richardson had been so often trodden, and with such success, 

 that at best he could hope only to be a happy imitator. He, there- 

 fore, very wisely struck out a new path for himself, and resolved, if 

 possible, to be the SUN of a new system. The result has been the 

 most triumphant success. We shall endeavour to trace the causes 

 of his prosperity. 



Sir Walter Scott as we believe, from his earliest youth down to 

 his latest days, was a diligent student of Scottish and British arche- 

 ology ; and if Froissart or De Brantome had lived until the present 

 day, they would have hailed Scott as one of themselves and well 

 worthy of their most intimate fellowship : but he was more. In 

 the earlier years of his life he gave up much of his time to the study 

 of the national character in all its various phases, and in the subse- 

 quent and more fully occupied periods of his career he omitted no 

 opportunity afforded by a temporary repose for increasing the accu- 

 mulated stores, which his wonderfully retentive memory placed fully 



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