bstituting a mere account
of the book, with a few expressions of like and dislike, for a grasped
and reasoned criticism of it. But this is far less peculiar to them than
those who have not read the early numbers of the great reviews may
suppose. The fact is that Jeffrey himself, Sydney Smith, Scott, and
others were only feeling for the principles and practice of reviewing,
as they themselves later, and the brilliant second generation of Carlyle
and Macaulay, De Quincey and Lockhart, were to carry it out. Perhaps the
very best specimens of Scott's powers in this direction are the prefaces
which he contributed much later and gratuitously to John Ballantyne's
_Novelists' Library_--things which hardly yield to Johnson's _Lives_ as
examples of the combined arts of criticism and biography. At the time
of which we speak he was 'making himself' in this direction as in
others. I hope that Jeffrey and not he was responsible for a fling at
Mary Woollstonecraft in the Godwin article, which would have been
ungenerous in any case, and which in this was unpardonable. But there is
nothing else to object to, and the _Amadis_ review in particular is a
very interesting one.

We must now look back a little, so as to give a brief sketch of Scott's
domestic life, from his marriage until the publication of _The Lay of
the Last Minstrel_, which, with that of _Waverley_ and the crash of
1825-26, supplies the three turning-points of his career. After a very
brief sojourn in lodgings (where the landlady was shocked at Mrs.
Scott's habit of sitting constantly in her drawing-room), the young
couple took up their abode in South Castle Street. Hence, not very long
afterwards, they moved to the house--the famous No. 39--in the northern
division of the same street, which continued to be her home for the rest
of her Edinburgh life, and Scott's so long as he could afford a house in
Edinburgh. Their first child was born on the 14th of October 1798, but
did not live many hours. As was (and for the matter of that is) much
more customary with Edinburgh residents, even of moderate means, than it
has been for at least a century with Londoners, Scott, while his own
income was still very modest, took a cottage at Lasswade in the
neighbourhood. Here he lived during the summer for years; and in March
1799 he and his wife went to London, for the first time in his case
since he had been almost a baby. His father died during this visit,
after a painful breakdown, whi