any theory upon. It is evident that this was not his vein, or
that, if the vein was there, he did not choose to work it.

To pass from negations to positives, the region in which Scott's power
of conception and expression did lie, and which he ruled with wondrous
range and rarely equalled power, was a strangely united kingdom of
common-sense fact and fanciful or traditional romance. No writer who has
had such a sense of the past, of tradition, of romantic literature, has
had such a grasp of the actual working motives and conduct of mankind;
none who has had the latter has even come near to his command of the
former. We may take Spenser and Fielding as the princes of these
separate principalities in English literature, and though each had gifts
that Scott had not,--though Scott had gifts possessed by neither,--yet
if we could conceive Spenser and Fielding blended, the blend would, I
think, come nearer to Scott's idiosyncrasy than anything else that can
be imagined. He had advanced (or rather returned) from that one-sided
eighteenth-century conception of nature which was content to know
_human_ nature pretty thoroughly up to a certain point, and to dismiss
'prospects,' in Johnson's scornful language to Thrale, as one just like
the other. But he had retained the eighteenth-century grasp of man
himself, while recovering the path to the Idle Lake and the Cave of
Despair, to the many-treed wood through which Una and her knight
journeyed, and the Rich Strand where all the treasures of antiquity lay.
We may think--apparently some of us do think--that we have improved on
him in the recovery, and even in the retaining grasp. The fact of the
improvement on him will take a great deal of proving, I am inclined to
think; of the fact of his achievement there is no doubt.

If I must select Scott's special literary characteristic, next to that
really magical faculty of placing scenes and peopling them with
characters in the memory of his readers which I have noticed before, I
should certainly fix on his humour. It is a good old scholastic
doctrine, that the greatest merit of anything is to be excellent in the
special excellence of its kind. And in that quality which so gloriously
differentiates English literature from all others, Scott is never
wanting, and is almost always pre-eminent. If his patriotism, intense as
it is, is never grotesque or offensive, as patriotism too often is to
readers who do not share it; if his pathos never to