[341] 

 THE SCOTT CENTENARY. 



[We here place on record two addresses wMch would have 

 appeared in an earlier number of the Canadian Journal, had it 

 been possible to find room for them.] 



THE GENIUS OF SCOTT. 



(An Address delivered by Prof. Daniel "Wilson, LL.D., at the Toronto Celebration of 

 the Scott Centenary, 1871. J 



"We meet to-day to mark with specially significant symbols the lapse of 

 another century. Throughont the world-wide empire of our English race and 

 tongue is being commemorated this day the fact that, one hundred years ago, 

 there was born one whose genius has added to the world's intellectual wealth, 

 to its higher aims and achievements, in lines of research undreamt of by him 

 whose genius thus lighted tlie way. Born in an age of progress; in that era of 

 revolution which shook the thrones of Europe to their foundations, and proclaimed 

 in thunder peals of warning and of promise that " old things were passing 

 away:" it was the specialty of Scott to be the minister of the old past. He 

 was to sing " The Lay of the Last Minstrel," and tell the last Makar's tale ; to 

 fix in all the enduring beauty of a sun-picture, by the light of his genius, 

 fashions of old times that were soon to become as obsolete for us as the era of 

 the mastodon. In an age in which the furor of political and social reconstruction 

 eradicated with indiscriminating waste all that was old and venerable for the 

 very reason that it was so, Scotland produced this apostle of sesthetic conser- 

 vatism. While philosophy, emancipated from the shackles of superstition, too 

 frequently marshalled intellect in antagonism to all that is purest and noblest in 

 the healthful instincts of the human soul, it was the fortune of Scott to be born 

 in one of those virtuous households of the sober, sedate middle class of 

 Presbyterian Scotland, so well described ere long in " The Excursion " of hia 

 great contemporary : — 



" Pure livers were they all, austere and grave, 

 And fearing God ; the very children taught 

 Stem self-respect, a reverence for God's word, 

 And an habitual piety, maintained 

 With strictness scarcely known on English ground." 



So the boy grew up in a •healthy, kindly social element — not indeed to 

 mature into the earnest piety, which, linked to his great genius, might have 

 made of him another Knox, another Luther — " the solitary monk who shook the 

 world ;" but to exercise a very remarkable^influence on its less vehement form 

 of aesthetic veneration. He was an antiquary almost from his cradle ; passionately 

 conservative; venerated monks, minstrels, crusaders, kings; could see a certain 

 poetry and beauty in the very Puritans that poets had loved to laugh at from 

 the days of Ben Jonson to Butler ; could discern how much that was heroic and 

 chivalrous lurked under the rough home-spun of the peasant-martyrs of the 



