454 Sir Waiter Scott. 



among his female characters, is quite sufficient to prove the author's 

 knowledge of the deep and secret workings of the female heart very 

 imperfect and unsatisfactory. It is not denied that the characters are 

 well drawn and give a stirring interest to the tales to which they 

 severally belong ; but they act not as women, whose mighty and 

 absorbing passion is love, whicji, indeed, may struggle for a white ^ 

 with contending emotions, but is always in the end victorious ; theyj 

 are cold and harsh, altogether deficient in that softness, delicacy, antf^ 

 warmth, which are inseparable from the female character. Of his^ 

 heroes and heroines, generally, we need not say a single word ; for 

 every reader of the novels knows as well as ourselves that they are 

 as uninteresting as a very mediocre talent could have made them? 

 Of another order of personages, whom Scott frequently makes the 

 arbiters on whom the destiny of his tales depends, we mean the 

 witches and gipsey-impostors, such as Meg-Merrilies, Norna of the 

 Fitful Head, Fenella, and the White Lady of Avenel, the import- 

 ance given to these characters in the working-out of the different 

 stories to which they belong, plainly indicates the existence of 

 superstitious feeling, from which many men, as clever as himself, 

 have not been exempt, although, doubtless, such beings once reallifa 

 exercised a great influence in an age marked by ignorance and % 

 credulity. These characters are sketched with great power; and 

 although we should be unable to discover their prototypes in real life, 

 they give such an intenseness of interest to the events which they 

 seem to controul, that, however much in strict justice we might 

 object to them, we should under existing circumstances regret their 

 removal. His best characters, it must be acknowledged after all, are 

 those historical personages for whose portraiture we have the best 

 authority from old documents. Claverhouse, Balfour, Rob Roy, and 

 the Duke of Leicester, characters widely differing from each other, 

 are depicted with a vividness and strength not to be found in any 

 of his merely imaginative male characters. 



The opinions, that have thus been given very freely and in the 

 face of a nation who blindly adore Walter Scott as the most splendid 

 genius of the nineteenth century, have not been advanced without 

 much consideration ; and as these observations are written only for 

 the purpose of exciting a spirit of enquiry into the sterling excellen- 

 cies of this great man, their writer is not anxious that his readers 

 should fall in with his own opinions on a question which may be 

 viewed in so many ways, and which after all discussion will finally 

 be resolved into a question of taste. 



Such have been the meditations, which the appearance of Mr. 

 Lockhart's book drew from us not from its own contents, but indi- 

 rectly, from the train of thought which it suggested. We have been 

 guilty of truisms without end, perhaps ; but no matter, if we have 

 told the truth ; and so, without more ado, in res medias. 



The life of a man, like Walter Scott, drawn from original docu- 

 ments and edited by his literary executor and son-in-law, must pos- 

 sess a [very high interest, inasmuch as it is the faithful picture of 

 a great man's mind. The first volume is in some respects the most 

 interesting of all, because it describes the events of Scott's early 

 life, told in his own words and in the choicest style of biography, 



