ings is one of the first and the
greatest of Scott's splendid gallery of romantic-historic portraits, the
stately figure of Claverhouse. All the features which he himself was to
sum up in that undying sentence of Wandering Willie's Tale later are
here put in detail and justified.

As for the companion to this masterly book, I have always thought the
earlier part of the _Black Dwarf_ as happy as all but the best of
Scott's work. But the character of the _Dwarf_ himself was not one that
he could manage. The nullity of Earnscliff and Isabel is complete.
Isabel's father is a stagy villain, or rather rascal (for Victor Hugo's
antithesis between _scelerat_ and _maroufle_ comes in here), and even
Scott has never hustled off a conclusion with such complete
_insouciance_ as to anything like completeness. Willie of Westburnflat
here, like Christie of the Clinthill later, is one of our old friends of
the poems back again, and welcome back again. But he and Hobbie can
hardly save a book which Scott seems to have thrown in with its
admirable companion, not as a makeweight, but rather as a foil.

Between the first and the second sets of _Tales_, the 'Author of
_Waverley_,' true to his odd design of throwing the public off the
scent, reappeared, and the result was _Rob Roy_. Perhaps because it was
written under the first attacks of that 'cramp of the stomach' which,
though obscurely connected with his later and more fatal ailments, no
doubt ushered them in something more than an accidental manner, Scott
did not at first much like _Rob_. But he was reconciled later; and
hardly anybody else (except those exceedingly unhappy persons who cannot
taste him at all) can ever have had any doubt about it. That the end is
even more than usually huddled, that the beginning may perhaps have
dawdled a little over commercial details (I do not think so myself, but
Lady Louisa Stuart did), and that the distribution of time, which
lingers over weeks and months before and after it devotes almost the
major part of the book to the events of forty-eight hours, is irregular,
even in the eyes of those who are not serfs to the unities, cannot be
denied. But almost from the introduction of Frank to Diana, certainly
from his setting off in the grey of the morning with Andrew Fairservice,
to the point at least where the heroine stoops from her pony in a manner
equally obliging and graceful, there is no dropped stitch, no false
note. Nor in any book are there so