THE SCOTT CENTENARY. 345 



Pardon me if I detain you a moment to indicate what appears to me to be the 

 key to all this misdirection of a great and noble genius. Scott was eminently 

 domestic in his tastes ; kindly, genial, replete with all hearty sociality. No 

 pictures of domestic life are pleasanter than those in which we see him helping 

 with simplest appliances the economic details of youthful house-keeping for his 

 daughter and son-in-law. He seems the very man to have basked in the sunshine 

 of the domestic hearth, and exclaimed with Burns : — 



" Princes and lords are tut the breath of kings. 

 An honest man's the nohlest worli of God." 



How was it that he yielded to such enslavement of a false ambition ; stooped 

 from the lofty vocation of genius ; and followed the iffriis fatuus of a romantic 

 dream to its bitter awakening ? In his twenty-sixth year, when he had just 

 produced his ' Lenore'; but while, as yet, no one dreamt of the genius that lay 

 concealed within him, we glean, from his own, and other letters, glimpses of an 

 attachment to a lady of his own social circle, in whom, as by-and-by appeared, 

 he had misconstrued friendly greetings into the response of love. She married 

 another. The disappointad lover did as many another has since done : gulped 

 down his agony in a long solitary ride, — through scenes afterwards immortalized 

 in his ' Lady of the Lake ;' — and, ere long, married in haste the first attractive 

 woman he met : Miss Charlotte Margaret Charpentier, daughter of a French 

 refugee. Unless I am deceived, I have seen and conversed with the lady of 

 Scott's early love; a noble, high-principled woman, who "peradventure had she 

 seen him first, might have made this, and that other world, another world for 

 him." There is no time to dwell on this now. But enough is known — and 

 much even may be gleaned amid all the reticence of Lockhart's biograjDhy, — to 

 show how, cheated of the kindly simplicities of a domestic life most suited to 

 his genial nature, Scott yielded to the dream of his later fancies, and sold his 

 birthright of genius for the tawdry shams of Rouge Dragon and the Lord Lyon 

 King of an obsolete pedantry. 



Amid all his undoubted estimation of fame at its full worth, Scott wrote with 

 no lofty aim ; scarcely with a higher purpose than to please others, and make 

 money for himself; and yet his great genius could not remain inoperative on his 

 own, or on later ages. It is wonderful indeed, considering how poor was the 

 aim he consciously set before himself, how great have been the fruits of his 

 genius. It is difficult for us now fully to realize all that that elder generation 

 felt and enjoyed in the resuscitation of the old life of by-gone centuries which 

 Scott wrought for them. The literature of which it is the type is wholly the 

 creation of his genius. As when Columbus had opened up the gates of the West, 

 and revealed this long lost Atlantis to the men of his time, it was easy to follow 

 in his wake ; so this master's art is now free to all ; and the modern apprentice 

 has already forgotten to whom it is due. The old past appeared before that 

 young present with a life as vigorous as its own. There they were ; the old 

 knights and dames, minstrels and men-at-arms, rough moss-troopers, gay 

 cavaliers, grim roundheads and covenanters ; royal crusader and sturdy com 

 moner alike, in all the hardy naturalness of life. It was a world of literature as 

 new and as real as that world which Columbus gave to Leon and Castile. How 



