342 * THE SCOTT CENTENAKY. 



covenant; nay, at length, carried conservative veneration to such transcendental 

 heights that, with a loyalty most genuinely devout, he bowed himself in the 

 house of Rimmon, and did worship with an enthusiasm beyond all ridicule to 

 that most unheroic embodiment of kingship, George the Fourth. 



But the veneration which embraced with such devout comprehensiveness, 

 elements so diverse, had its origin in higher sources than a mere antiquarian 

 reverence for the past. Scott was a true poet. The dreams of his boyhood 

 already bodied forth the forms of things unseen ; and imagination busied itself 

 with the fantasies of a world of its own creating. He lisped in numbers; and 

 his biogragher has preserved for us a kindly glimpse of old home sympathies 

 amid which the young poet wrought. A little piece of verse, penned in a 

 boyish hand, when but eleven years of age, was found after his death, folded up 

 and inscribed in his mother's hand; — ''My Walter's first lines." Yet the 

 vigorous, life-depicting powers, which were ere long to " hold as 'twere the 

 mirror up to nature," were of no hot-bed prematurity of growth. His fine, 

 spirited rendering of Burger's strange weird ballad of Lenore — his true assay 

 , piece as a poet, was not produced until his twenty-sixth year. He was not 

 forced into premature manhood like Scotland's great peasant ; either by the 

 harsh necessities of poverty, or by the overmastering temptations of unbridled 

 passion. All his early surroundings were healthy and healthful ; and he grew 

 up that strange compound of shrewd, sagacious, worldly common-sense ; and of 

 romantic, visionary longings after a lost golden age of his own fancy's creation: 

 which wrought for him and for us the heroic tragedy of his life. 



As a poet, Scott has not only been eclipsed by the splendour of his more 

 brilliant prose romance; but he continues even now to be estimated below 

 his worth. He is a poet of the old Homeric school, — graphic, truthful, 

 natural. His virtues and his faults alike protect him from the subtleties of that 

 metaphysical school begot amid the throes of the French revolution, — including 

 the greatest names among the poets of the past generation, — who seem all beset 

 by the same strange desire to upbuild the whole philosophy of human thought, 

 wrecked in the convulsions of that wild revolt, which has repeated itself in a 

 communistic reign of terror under our own eyes. As a poet, Scott had none of 

 the tragic earnestness and profundity of Shakspeare — with whom, in his prose 

 writings, he is more fitly paralleled. But he has a true eye for all the pathos 

 and sublimity of inanimate nature, and, with artistic power, recreates for us the 

 vision of beauty : the streams and mountains of his native land ; " Sweet 

 Teviot by her silver tide ;" or Ochil's mountains in the morning rays, when 



" As each heathy top they kissed 

 It gleamed a purple amethyst." 



And with all this was linked the passionate fervour of a warm Scottish heart, 

 for which every rock and glen, every hill and valley of his native land was dear 

 as the temple shrine of Jerusalem to the exiled Hebrew by the waters of 

 Babylon . 



A century unrivalled in heroic deeds and national triumphs, fills the completed 

 cycle between that birth which we commemorate and this centenary day. The 

 political map of Europe has been recast ; its intellectual and moral statics have 



