t had never been done with really commanding
ability on the great scale.

In _Waverley_ Scott supplied these two aspects, the historical-romantic
and the national-characteristic, with a felicity perhaps all the more
unerring in that it seems to have been only partly conscious. The
subject of 'the Forty-five' was now fully out of taboo, and yet retained
an interest more than antiquarian. The author had the amplest stores of
knowledge, and that sympathy which is so invaluable to the artist when
he keeps it within the limits of art. He seems to have possessed by
instinct (for there was nobody to teach him) the paramount secret of the
historical novelist, the secret of making his central and prominent
characters fictitious, and the real ones mostly subsidiary. On the other
hand, the knowledge of his native country, which he had been
accumulating for almost the whole of his nearly four-and-forty years of
life, was joined in him with that universal knowledge of humanity which
only men of the greatest genius have. I am, indeed, aware that both
these positions have been attacked. I was much pleased, some time after
I had begun to write this little book, to find in a review of the
present year of grace these words: 'Scott only knew a small portion of
human nature, and he was unable to portray the physiognomy of the past.'
I feared at first that this might be only one of the numerous flings of
our young barbarians, a pleasant, or pleasantly intended, flirt of the
heels of the New Humour. But the context showed that the writer was in
deadly earnest. I shall not attempt here to explain to him, in a popular
or any other style, that he is, perhaps, not quite right. Life itself is
not long enough--'little books' are decidedly too short--for a
demonstration that the Pacific Ocean is not really a small portion of
the terrestrial water-space, or that Alexander was able to overrun
foreign countries. We may find a little room in the Conclusion to say
something more about Scott's range and his faculty. Here it will be
enough to wear our friend's rue with a slight difference, and to say
that _Waverley_ and its successors showed in their author knowledge,
complete in all but certain small parts, of human nature, and an almost
unlimited faculty of portraying the physiognomy of the past.

It was scarcely to be expected that a book which was anonymous, and of
which only a very few persons knew the real authorship, while even those
who guessed i