The two

Covenanters is very finely and dramatically maintained. skilfully opposed personages of Claverhouse and Burley exhibit the author's unrivalled power of seizing and reproducing past ages. His knowledge, both in detail and in its general character, of the epoch which he painted, was immense, and in the vast variety of subordinate characters which crowd his canvas, the wild preachers, Serjeant Bothwell, Major Morton, the old lady of Tillitudlem, we see a truly Shakspearian richness of humor and invention. The scene in the hut after the defeat of the Covenanters, when they are preparing to put to death young Morton, is one of the highest efforts of breathless dramatic interest. Scott is accused of allowing his strong Tory and Episcopalian prejudices to color his portraiture of the two parties, and of painting Claverhouse in too favorable, and the persecuted Whigs in too gloomy a tone; but we must not forget the never-failing air of general truth which pervades his pictures, nor the fact that while he certainly does full justice to the stern patriotism and fervent though mistaken piety of the victims, the qualities of the dominant party were in themselves more picturesque and engaging than those of their opponents. The portrait of a sombre Puritan may indeed be admirable as a picture, but the eye will infallibly rest with more complacency on a knight or courtier by Velasquez.

In the Heart of Midlothian the interest is almost exclusively of a domestic kind, and concentrated on the sufferings of a humble peasant family for though the Porteous riot, with which the tale opens, is to a certain degree historical, and is related with Scott's unfailing animation and vividness, the reader's feelings are principally enlisted in favor of the heroism of Jeanie Deans and the fate of her unhappy sister. That heroism, as is well known, was no invention, but a real transcript from the annals of humble life: but the weary pilgrimage of Jeanie, though founded upon the self-devotion of a real Helen Walker, is none the less powerfully narrated, and no less powerfully seizes on our sympathies. Her adventures on her journey to London, and in particular the scenes with Madge Wildfire, are of a high order of fiction at once real and intense.

The Bride of Lammermoor is the most tragic and gloomy in its tone of Scott's earlier romances, which are generally characterized, like all his writings, by a gay, hopeful, and cheering tone of thought. The incidents on which it is founded were drawn from the annals of an ancient Scottish family. This story is perhaps one of the most impressive of them all: there reigns throughout, from the first page to the last painful catastrophe, a sort of atmosphere of sorrow and foreboding, that weighs upon the mind like the breathless pause that presages the hurricane. The action has been compared to that of the Greek tragedy. Fate, cruel and irresistible destiny, overshadows the whole horizon, and the innocent are hurried onward to their doom by the uncontrolled force of a pitiless fatality. The personage of the Master of Ravenswood is in a high degree impressive in its melancholy grandeur; and terror and pity are powerfully combined in the concluding

scenes.

The death of the hero, though described with extreme simplicity, is pathetic in the extreme, and the finding of the plume of his lost master by the faithful Caleb, "who dried it and placed it in his bosom," is a touch of intense and natural pathos.

The Legend of Montrose is chiefly admirable for the inexhaustible humor of Dugald Dalgetty, whose selfishness, pedantry, and military quaintness render him one of the most amusing personages in fiction. This was a character after Scott's own heart, and being profoundly true not only to general nature but to particular individuality, we can easily understand the delight with which the author must have traced out its oddities and held it up in every light and attitude.

§ 9. Ivanhoe was the first romance in which Scott undertook the delineation of a remote historical epoch. That which he selected was the eventful period when the process of fusion was going on which ultimately united the Norman oppressors and the Saxon serfs into one nationality. The whole tale is a dazzling succession of feudal pictures: the outlaw life of the green wood, the Norman donjon, the lists, the tournament, and the stake, pass before our eyes with a splendor and animation that are truly magical, and make us forget the occasional anachronisms and errors of costume. Robin Hood, under the name of Locksley, is most felicitously introduced, and the chivalric Lion-heart is powerfully contrasted with the meanness and tyranny of John. It has always struck me as a strong proof of the inherent nobility of Scott's nature, that while faithfully representing all the base and odious features of this wretch's character, he still preserves the princely character, and makes John, though a coward, an ingrate, and a tyrant, retain the external manners of his royal blood. The personage of Rebecca is one of the most beautiful and ideal in fiction; Scott is said to have considered it as his finest female character; and the heroism is never made incompatible either with probability or with what may be called historical verisimilitude. The drinking scene between the Black Knight and the jolly Hermit is full of humor and rollicking gayety, and the whole description of the Passage of Arms at Ashby is like an illuminated MS. of the Middle Ages. The scene of the execution of the Jewess carries the reader's interest up to the highest point.

The two stories of the Monastery and the Abbot form an uninterrupted series of adventures. The life and manners of the times are painted with surprising force and variety: and the character of Mary Stuart predominates throughout the whole picture in all the grace and attractiveness of its charms and of its misfortunes. The chivalrous and noble nature of Scott shines out brilliantly in every page of these stories; and we hardly blame him for the somewhat misplaced and melodramatic introduction in the former romance of the supernatural interposition of the White Lady of Avenel. The scenes of Mary's captivity at Lochleven, and her escape, are intensely interesting: and the characters of the two brothers Glendinning, the Knight and the Priest, are very picturesquely contrasted.

Kenilworth paints, and with great vigor, the age of Elizabeth. The

misfortunes of Amy Robsart ultimately culminate in a catastrophe almost too painful : but the characters of the Lion-Queen and her court stand out as in the historical dramas of Shakspeare. Perhaps there are few scenes more picturesque and telling than the forced reconciliation of Leicester and Essex in the Queen's presence; and her behavior, both there and on all the occasions when she appears, is consonant not only with abstract female nature, but is exquisitely appropriated to the particular nature of that great Princess. The episode of Wayland Smith is a melancholy example of the indiscriminate greediness with which a novelist is apt to press everything into his service: the transformation of the grand and mythical Dædalus of Scandinavian mythology into the cheat and quacksalver of the sixteenth century is extremely unfortunate: but it is more than compensated for by the touching episode of old Sir Walter Robsart's despair at the elopement of his daughter.

In the enchanting tale of the Pirate Scott gives us the fruits of a pleasure expedition which he had taken to the Northern Archipelago: the wild, simple, half-Scandinavian manners of that region furnished him with fresh and unhackneyed dramatis persona, which he placed amid scenery then almost unknown, and possessing a powerful interest. The two sisters, Minna and Brenda, are among the most graceful and highly finished of his female portraits; and Norna of the Fitful Head is a creation of the same order as Meg Merrilies, though certainly inferior on the whole. The description of the wreck of the 'Revenge' is very powerfully written; and the festivities in the house of the glorious old Udaller are painted with unflagging verve. This novel offers two examples of injudicious harping upon one topic a fault which Scott, Claude Halcro, with

like many other novelists, occasionally falls into. his eternal recollections of Dryden, is singularly out of place in the Orkneys, though not more so than Jack Bunce, with his flighty manners and quotations from rhyming tragedies, among the ruffian crew of the pirate. Goffe, however, is a little sketch of consummate merit.

§ 10. London in the reign of James I., the London of Shakspeare, was the scene of the excellent novel of Nigel. The character of the King is as fine and as complete as anything that Scott had hitherto done. The scenes in Alsatia, the drinking-bout at Duke Hildebrod's, and the murder of the old usurer in Whitefriars, are inimitably good. It is true that the junction between the two plots in this novel is not very artificial, and the catastrophe is both hurried and improbable; but these defects are more than counterbalanced by the astonishing force and brilliancy of particular scenes.

Peveril of the Peak is principally defective in the melodramatic and unsatisfactory parts played by Christian, the evil genius of the story, and the strange dumb dancing-girl who is made the instrument of his long-cherished revenge. These mysterious figures harmonize but ill with the gay and profligate court of Charles II. and with the somewhat prosaic details of the Popish conspiracy and the intrigues of Buckingham. The old cavalier Peveril is well contrasted with the gloomy and

brooding republican Major Bridgenorth; but Scott, in this novel, has retained too much of his naturally chivalrous and mediæval tone, which is discordant when recurring amid the trivialities and Frenchified debauchery of a period which was in all essentials the very reverse of chivalric. The antithetical and epigrammatic mode in which Buckingham is described, though admirable in Dryden's satire, is quite contrary to the spirit of narrative fiction: and the dwarf, Geoffrey Hudson, is an unnatural excrescence on the story.

The striking and picturesque scenes and manners of the time of Louis XI., and the opposition of the two strongly-contrasted personages of that perfidious tyrant and Charles the Bold of Burgundy, render Quentin Durward a most fascinating story, in spite of the anachronisms and falsifications of historical truth; and many of the scenes, as the revelry of the Boar of Ardennes in the Bishop's palace at Liège, are executed with wonderful force and animation. The reception of the Burgundian declaration of war by Louis in the midst of his court, and the supper at which he receives Crevecœur, while the archer is secretly posted with his loaded musket behind the screen, are examples of Scott's peculiar power of delineation.

In St. Ronan's Well the principal plot is of so gloomy, painful, and hopeless a character that the reader follows it with reluctance. The general cloud of sorrow and suffering is perhaps not darker in this novel than in the Bride of Lammermoor; but in the latter that sorrow is elevated by dignity and picturesque association, while in this almost all the persons are as odious as they are commonplace. The Earl of Etherington, the villain of the story, is less of a nobleman than of a swindler and a blackguard, and the hopeless persecution of Clara is never relieved by a single gleam of sunshine. Nevertheless the story contains, among the twaddling and prosaic crowd which is assembled at the Spa, one of those characteristic and perfectly-drawn Scottish figures in which this great author had no rival. Meg Dods is more than enough to compensate for the coarse brutality of some of the characters, and the frivolity of the others. Scott's peculiar powers seem to have deserted him when he attempted to delineate the affectations and absurdities of contemporary fashionable or would-be fashionable society.

Redgauntlet is the only novel in which Scott has adopted the epistolary form of narration. The letters in which the narrative is couched express very agreeably the strongly-opposed character of the two young friends; and in the portions supposed to be written by Alan Fairford, the young Edinburgh advocate, we find many charming recollections of the author's early life. The old Writer, his father, is, in all probability, a portrait of Scott's own father; and his adventures, when wandering in search of his friend, bring him in contact with things and persons delineated with extraordinary force; old Summertrees, with his story of his escape, and above all Nanty Ewart, the smuggling captain, and his narrative of his own life, are masterpieces. I may also mention the admirable ghost story related by the old fiddler,

than which nothing was ever more impressive. Darsie Latimer, like most of Scott's heroes, is rather too much of the walking gentleman, little more than a mere tool in the hands of more powerful plotters.

§ 11. The two novels the Betrothed and the Talisman constitute the series entitled Tales of the Crusaders. In them the author returns to those feudal times of which he was so unrivalled a painter. The Betrothed is far inferior to its companion: perhaps the scene of the action - the Marches of the Welsh Border - and the conflict between the Wild Celts and the Norman frontier garrison -was in itself less attractive both to reader and writer: true it is, that with the exception of some vigorous and stirring scenes, as for example the desperate sally and death of Raymond Berenger amid the swarms of the Celtic savages who are beleaguering his castle, this tale is read with less pleasure and returned to with less avidity than any except the latest productions of Scott's pen. The Talisman, on the contrary, is one of the most dazzling and attractive of them all: the heroic splendor of the scenery, personages, and adventures, the admirable contrast between Cœur de Lion and Saladin, and the magnificent contrast of the chivalry of Europe with the heroism and civilization of the East, all this makes the Talisman a book equally delightful to the young and to the old. The introduction of familiar and even of comic details, with which Scott, like Shakspeare, knew how to relieve and set off his heroic pictures, renders this story peculiarly delightful. We seem to be brought near to the great and historic characters, and admitted as it were into their private life; we see that they are men like ourselves. The incidents in which the noble hound so picturesquely figures show how deep were Scott's sympathy with and knowledge of animal nature. There are few of his novels in which by some exquisite touch of description or some pathetic stroke of fidelity he does not interest us in the fate and character of dogs as profoundly as in the human persons. Fangs in Ivanhoe, Bevis in Woodstock, the Peppers and Mustards of Charlie's Hope, even the pointer Juno who runs away with the Antiquary's buttered toast, ― every one of these animals has its distinctive physiognomy; and we cannot wonder that Scott himself was as fond of real dogs as he makes us interested in his imaginary canine personages.

The action of Woodstock is placed just after the fatal defeat at Worcester; and Cromwell and Charles II. both appear in the action. The interest, however, is really concentrated upon the noble figure of the chivalrous old royalist gentleman Sir Henry Lee. The lofty qualities of this cavalier patriarch are so well and so naturally tempered with weaknesses and foibles, that the character is truly living and real. Many of the subordinate scenes and characters, too, as Jocelyn the ranger, Wildrake, the plotting Dr. Rochecliffe, even Phoebe and the old woman, are ever fresh and interesting. The euthanasia of the old knight, amid the full triumph of the Restoration, is a scene powerfully and pathetically conceived, and may bear a comparison with that almost sublime passage, the description of the death of Mrs. Witherington in the Sur