346 THE SCOTT CENTENARY. 



much we owe to this is now dificult to exaggerate. A truth simple, but long 

 lorgotten flashed conviction into the minds of all men that history is the past- 

 deeds of living men ; that the past was once a living present like our own. To 

 Scott we owe the wonderful vitality of modern history. Hallam, Macaulay, 

 Carlyle, Motley, Froude, have all kindled their torch at the same lambent flame. 

 And to him is no less due the wonderful living spirit of modern archaeology. 

 Antiquarian research is no longer the old Dryasdust of trifling dilettanteism ; 

 but the enlightened handmaid of history. Nay more : with that reanimation of 

 old borderers and cavaliers, of knights and crusading barons, began the faith in 

 the possibility of a resuscitated past, which has led us back, step by step, from 

 historic to prehistoric man: Lyell and Huxley, Lubboch and Worsaae, De 

 Perthes, Keller, Morlot and Lartet have each caught inspiration from the genius 

 of Scott ; and learned 



" To seize events as yet unkaown to man. 

 And dart his soul into tlie dawning plan." 



It was the wonderful blending of the poet and the antiquary; — things previously 

 deemed more irreconcileable than fire and water, — which thus breathed life into 

 the dead ashes of tlie past, and lifted for us the hoary skirts of time. All this 

 and much more we owe to the genius of Scott. A poet of the old Homeric 

 school, a brother of the free minstrel of the brookside and public highway, of 

 the genial sunshine of human sympathy ; he not only rejected the subtleties of 

 Coleridge's and Shelley's metaphysical verse, and the morbid anatomisings of 

 Byron's subjecive mind and vicious heart ; but he breathed into the literature of 

 fiction a healthful moral atmosphere which has revolutionized the republie 

 of letters far more thoroughly than all the changes yet wrought on the body 

 politic. To his healthful sympathies the quiet glow of the sunset was grander 

 than the lurid blaze of the lightning, and the rosy gleam of the dawn or the 

 broad beauty of the noon more impressive than the tempest's gloom. Hia 

 antique fancies blended harmoniously with his pure poetic taste, and made him 

 delight in reanimating the living landscape with a life of the past as real and 

 vital as its own. Should the influences of this centenary celebration revive the 

 Btudy of Scott as a poet, it will not lead to any exaggerated estimate of his 

 worth, for as such he can claim no place alongside of the few great poets of all 

 time ; but it will recall us to the familliar study of one who had a true poet'a 

 eye for the beauty and the poetry of simple nature ; the beauty and the poetry 

 that lie about us all, here and everywhere, had we but,'like him, "the vision and 

 the faculty divine." And if such be the case it will supply an antidote not 

 wholly unneeded in the age which rejoices in the genius of Browning and 

 Tennyson, 



Such, however inadequately presented to you, are some of the enduring 

 influences which we owe to the genius of Scott : and therefore it is fitting that 

 here, in the capital of this young Canadian province, as throughout the world, 

 wide empire won to itself by the Anglo-Saxon race ; and beyond it in other 

 lands and among other tongues ; we gather to commemorate the birth, one 

 hundred years ago, of one who, by his writings, has added to the world's true 

 wealth, an El Dorado more precious than that of Ophir or Peru; by the 



