eed have been a credit to his
turtle-soup. Let us pass by with a brief lamentation that so great and
good a man laid himself open to Carlyle's charge of sham worship. We
have lost our love of buff jerkins and other scraps from mediaeval
museums, and Scott is suffering from having preferred working in stucco
to carving in marble. We are perhaps inclined to saddle Scott
unconsciously with the sins of a later generation. Borrow, in his
delightful 'Lavengro,' meets a kind of Jesuit in disguise in that
sequestered dell where he beats 'the Blazing Tinman.' The Jesuit, if I
remember rightly, confides to him that Scott was a tool of that
diabolical conspiracy which has infected our old English Protestantism
with the poison of modern Popery. And, though the evil may be traced
further back, and was due to more general causes than the influence of
any one writer, Scott was clearly responsible in his degree for certain
recent phenomena. The buff jerkin became the lineal ancestor of various
copes, stoles, and chasubles which stink in the nostrils of honest
dissenters. Our modern revivalists profess to despise the flimsiness of
the first attempts in this direction. They laugh at the carpenter's
Gothic of Abbotsford or Strawberry Hill, and do not ask themselves how
their own more elaborate blundering will look in the eyes of a future
generation. What will our posterity think of our masquerading in old
clothes? Will they want a new Cromwell to sweep away nineteenth-century
shams, as his ancestors smashed mediaeval ruins, or will they, as we may
rather hope, be content to let our pretentious rubbish find its natural
road to ruin? One thing is pretty certain, and in its way comforting;
that, however far the rage for revivalism may be pushed, nobody will
ever want to revive the nineteenth century. But for Scott, in spite of
his complicity in this wearisome process, there is something still to be
said. 'Ivanhoe' cannot be given up. The vivacity of the description--the
delight with which Scott throws himself into the pursuit of his
knicknacks and antiquarian rubbish, has something contagious about it.
'Ivanhoe,' let it be granted, is no longer a work for men, but it still
is, or still ought to be, delightful reading for boys. The ordinary boy,
indeed, when he reads anything, seems to choose descriptions of the
cricket-matches and boat-races in which his soul most delights. But
there must still be some unsophisticated youths who can relish 'Ro