70 FAMOUS SCOTS 



of necessity be a sealed book the play of Hamlet with- 

 out the royal Dane. To the English reader this has 

 been largely obscured, from the fact that the chief 

 sources of information open to him are not such as 

 present a rational or connected story. George Borrow 

 found that Scott's caricature of Old Mortality was what 

 Englishmen had in their minds, and that some thin 

 romanticism about Prince Charles Edward was the end 

 and substance of their knowledge. Yet such a pre- 

 sentation would be no less absurd than Hudibras would 

 be for the men of the Long Parliament. Scott was too 

 much occupied with the external and material condi- 

 tions of the country, too much engrossed by obvious 

 necessity of materials in the romantic element of 

 Scottish history, and too little in sympathy with the 

 spiritual and moral forces at work to present anything 

 like a complete narrative, while his feudal sentiments 

 were nourished by the almost entire lack of the poli- 

 tical instinct. The ecclesiastical chapters in John Hill 

 Burton's History are not equal to the main body of 

 his work; and, if the Lectures of Dean Stanley are 

 the characteristically thin production of one confessing 

 to but a superficial knowledge of the vast literature of 

 the field,' the Ecclesiastical History of Grub is only the 

 work of a mere Episcopalian antiquary, and the lack of 

 judgment and political insight appears on every page. 

 ' It seems to me,' says Carlyle, * hard measure that this 

 Scottish man Knox, now after three hundred years, 

 should have to plead like a culprit before the world, 



