etiquette of the rule of distributive justice, to give every man his
own. Scott, I think, would have accepted the principle, though not the
application, of the sentence of Timoleon de Cosse, Duke of Brissac--'God
has made thee a gentleman, and the king has made thee a duke.' And he
honoured God and the king by behaving accordingly.

Of his infinite merits as a host and a guest, as a friend and as a
relation, there is a superabundance of evidence. It does not appear that
he ever lost an old friend; and though, like most men who have more
talent for friendship than for acquaintance, he did not latterly make
many new ones, the relations existing between himself and Lockhart are
sufficient proof of his faculty of playing the most difficult of all
parts, that of elder friend to younger. I have said above that, though
in no sense touchy, he was a very dangerous person to take a liberty
with; he adopted to the full the morality of his time about duelling,
though he disapproved of it;[49] he was in all respects a man of the
world, yet without guile.

It is, moreover, quite certain that Scott, though never talking much
about religion (as, indeed, he never talked much about any of the deeper
feelings of the heart), was a man very sincerely religious. He was not a
metaphysician in any way, and therefore had no special inclination
towards that face or summit of metaphysics which is called theology. And
it is pretty clear that he had towards disputed points of doctrine,
ceremony, and discipline, a not sharply or decidedly formulated
attitude. But there is no doubt whatever that he was a thoroughly and
sincerely orthodox Christian, and there are some slight escapes of
confession unawares in his private writings, which show in what thorough
conformity with his death his life had been. Few men have ever so well
observed the one-half of the apostle's doctrine as to pure religion; and
if he did not keep himself (in the matter of the secret partnership and
others) altogether unspotted from the world, the sufferings of his last
seven years may surely be taken as a more than sufficient purification.
More blameless morally, I think, few men have been; fewer still better
equipped with the positive virtues. And, above all, we must recognise in
Scott (if we have any power of such recognition) what has been already
called a certain nobleness, a certain natural inclination towards all
things high, and great, and pure, and of good report, which