what he describes. Scott's best novels depend, for their deep
interest, upon the scenery and society with which he had been familiar
in his early days, more or less harmonised by removal to what we may
call, in a different sense from the common one, the twilight of history;
that period, namely, from which the broad glare of the present has
departed, and which we can yet dimly observe without making use of the
dark lantern of ancient historians, and accepting the guidance of
Dryasdust. Dandie Dinmont, though a contemporary of Scott's youth,
represented a fast perishing phase of society; and Balfour of Burley,
though his day was past, had yet left his mantle with many spiritual
descendants who were scarcely less familiar. Between the times so fixed
Scott seems to exhibit his genuine power; and within these limits we
should find it hard to name any second, or indeed any third.

Indeed, when we have gone as far as we please in denouncing shams,
ridiculing men in buff-jerkins, and the whole Wardour Street business of
gimcrack and Brummagem antiquities, it still remains true that Scott's
great service was what we may call the vivification of history. He made
us feel, it is generally said, as no one had ever made us feel before,
that the men of the past were once real human beings; and I can agree if
I am permitted to make a certain distinction. His best service, I should
say, was not so much in showing us the past as it was when it was
present; but in showing us the past as it is really still present. His
knights and crusaders and feudal nobles are after all unreal, and the
best critics felt even in his own day that his greatest triumphs were in
describing the Scottish peasantry of his time. Dandie Dinmont and Jeanie
Deans and their like are better than many Front de Boeufs and Robin
Hoods. It is in dealing with his own contemporaries that he really shows
the imaginative insight which entitles him to be called a great creator
as well as an amusing story-teller. But this, rightly stated, is not
inconsistent with the previous statement. For the special characteristic
of Scott as distinguished from his predecessors is precisely his clear
perception that the characters whom he loved so well and described so
vividly were the products of a long historical evolution. His patriotism
was the love of a country in which everything had obvious roots in its
previous history. The stout farmer Dinmont was the descendant of the old
borderers