THE SCOTT CENTENARY. 349 



struggles of his time. He was a fiery partisan; a Tory in arms against the 

 French Revolution. In his account of the coronation of George IV. a passionate 

 worship of monarchy breaks forth, which, if we did not know his noble nature, 

 we might call slavish. He sacrificed ease, and at last life, to his feudalistic 

 aspirations. On one occasion he was even carried beyond the bounds of 

 propriety by his opposition to the Whig chief. The Cavalier was his political 

 ancestor, the Covenanter the ancestor of his political enemy. The idols which 

 the Covenanting iconoclast broke were his. He would have fought against the 

 first revolution under Montrose, and against the second under Dundee. Yet he 

 is perfectly, serenely just to the opposite party. Not only is he just, he is 

 sympathetic. He brings out their work, their valour, such grandeur of character 

 as they have, with all the power of his art, making no distinction in this respect 

 between friend and foe. If they have a ridiculous side he uses it for the 

 purposes of his art, but genially, playfully, without malice. If there was a 

 laugh left in the Covenanters, they would have laughed at their own portraits aa 

 painted by Scott. He shows no hatred of anything but wickedness itself. Such 

 a novelist is a most eifective preacher of liberality and charity : he brings our 

 hearts nearer to the Impartial Father of us all. 



The Lamp of Impersonality. — Personality is lower than partiality. Dante 

 himself is open to the suspicion of partiality: it is said, not without 

 apparent ground, that he puts into hell the enemies of the political cause 

 which, in his eyes, was that of Italy and God. A legend tells that Leonardo 

 da Vinci was warned that his divine picture of the Last Supper should 

 fade, because he had introduced his personal enemy as Judas, and thus 

 desecrated art by making it serve personal hatred. The legend must be 

 false. Leonardo had too grand a soul. A wretched woman in England, 

 at the beginning of the last century, Mrs. Manley, systematically employed 

 fiction as a cover for personal libel ; but such an abuse of art as this could be 

 practised or countenanced only by the vile. Novelists, however, often debase 

 fiction by obtruding their personal vanities, favouritisms, fanaticisms and 

 antipathies. I saw, the other day, a novel, the author of which brings himself 

 in almost by name as a heroic character, with a description of his own personal 

 appearance, residence, and habits, as fond fancy paints them to himself. There 

 is a novelist, who is a man of fashion, and who makes the age of the heroes in 

 his successive novels advance with his own, so that at last we shall have irresis- 

 tible fascination at four score years and ten. But the commonest and the most 

 mischievous way in which personality breaks out is pamphleteering under the 

 guise of fiction. One novel is a pamplet against lunatic asylums, another against 

 model prisons, a third against the poor law, a fourth against the government 

 oiEces, a fifth against trades' unions. In these pretended works of imagination, 

 facts are coined in support of a crotchet or antipathy with all the license of 

 fiction ; calumny revels without restraint, and no cause is served but that of 

 falsehood and injustice. A writer takes offence at the excessive popularity of 

 athletic sports ; instead of bringing out an accurate and conscientious treatise 

 to advocate moderation, he lets fly a novel, painting the typical boating man as a 

 seducer of confiding women, the betrayer of his friend, and the murderer of his 

 6 



