finished. Scott can
hardly be said to have bequeathed good luck to any of these his
descendants.

It was at the end of 1819, after Walter the younger left home, and
before Sophia's marriage, that the next in order of the _Waverley
Novels_ (now again such by title, and not _Tales of my Landlord_)
appeared. This was _Ivanhoe_, which was published in a rather costlier
shape than its forerunners, and yet sold to the extent of twelve
thousand copies in its three-volume form. Lockhart, perhaps with one of
the few but graceful escapes of national predilection (it ought not to
be called prejudice) to be noticed in him, pronounces this a greater
work of art, but a less in genius than its purely Scottish predecessors.
As there is nothing specially English in _Ivanhoe_, but only an attempt
to delineate Normans and Saxons before the final blend was formed, an
Englishman may, perhaps, claim at least impartiality if he accepts the
positive part of Lockhart's judgment and demurs to the negative.
Although the worst of Scott's cramps were past, he was still in anything
but good health when he composed the novel, most of which was dictated,
not written; and his avocations and bodily troubles together may have
had something to do with those certainly pretty flagrant anachronisms
which have brought on _Ivanhoe_ the wrath of Dryasdust. But Dryasdust is
_adeo negligibile ut negligibilius nihil esse possit_, and the book is a
great one from beginning to end. The mere historians who quarrel with it
have probably never read the romances which justify it, even from the
point of view of literary 'document.' The picturesque opening; the
Shakespearean character of Wamba; the splendid Passage of Arms; the more
splendid siege of Torquilstone; the gathering up of a dozen popular
stories of the 'King-and-the-Tanner' kind into the episodes of the Black
Knight and the Friar; the admirable, if a little conventional, sketch of
Bois-Guilbert, the pendant in prose to Marmion; the more admirable
contrast of Rebecca and Rowena; and the final Judgment of God, which for
once vindicates Scott from the charge of never being able to wind up a
novel,--with such subsidiary sketches as Gurth, Prior Aymer, Isaac,
Front-de-Boeuf (Urfried, I fear, will not quite do, except in the
final interview with her tempter-victim), Athelstane, and others--give
such a plethora of creative and descriptive wealth as nobody but Scott
has ever put together in prose. Even the nominal her