acy of speech, and redolent of their native soil
in every word and gesture? To every man his method according to his
talent. Scott is the most perfectly delightful of story-tellers, and it
is the very essence of story-telling that it should not follow
prescribed canons of criticism, but be as natural as the talk by
firesides, and, it is to be feared, over many gallons of whisky-toddy,
of which it is, in fact, the refined essence. Scott skims off the cream
of his varied stores of popular tradition and antiquarian learning with
strange facility; but he had tramped through many a long day's march,
and pored over innumerable ballads and forgotten writers, before he had
anything to skim. Had he not--if we may use the word without
offence--been cramming all his life, and practising the art of
story-telling every day he lived? Probably the most striking incidents
of his books are in reality mere modifications of anecdotes which he had
rehearsed a hundred times before, just disguised enough to fit into his
story. Who can read, for example, the inimitable legend of the blind
piper in 'Redgauntlet' without seeing that it bears all the marks of
long elaboration as clearly as one of those discourses of Whitfield,
which, by constant repetition, became marvels of dramatic art? He was an
impromptu composer, in the sense that when his anecdotes once reached
paper, they flowed rapidly, and were little corrected; but the
correction must have been substantially done in many cases long before
they appeared in the state of 'copy.'

Let us, however, pursue the indictment a little further. Scott did not
believe in anything in particular. Yet once more, did Shakespeare? There
is surely a poetry of doubt as well as a poetry of conviction, or what
shall we say to 'Hamlet'? Appearing in such an age as the end of the
last and the beginning of this century, Scott could but share the
intellectual atmosphere in which he was born, and at that day, whatever
we may think of this, few people had any strong faith to boast of. Why
should not a poet stand aside from the chaos of conflicting opinions, so
far as he was able to extricate himself from the unutterable confusion
around them, and show us what was beautiful in the world as he saw it,
without striving to combine the office of prophet with his more
congenial occupation? Carlyle did not mean to urge so feeble a criticism
as that Scott had no very uncompromising belief in the Thirty-nine
Articles; for