ar on his own people; and both have achieved immortal
triumphs. But Scotland is proud of her great national minstrel--and as
long as she is Scotland, will wash and warm the laurels round his brow,
with rains and winds that will for ever keep brightening their glossy
verdure. Whereas England, ungrateful ever to her men of genius, already
often forgets the poetry of Southey; while Little Britain abuses his
patriotism in his politics. The truth is, that Scotland had forgotten
her own history till Sir Walter burnished it all up till it glowed
again--it is hard to say whether in his poetry or in his prose the
brightest--and the past became the present. We know now the character of
our own people as it showed itself in war and peace--in palace, castle,
hall, hut, hovel, and shieling--through centuries of advancing
civilisation, from the time when Edinburgh was first ycleped Auld
Reekie, down to the period when the bright idea first occurred to her
inhabitants to call her the Modern Athens. This he has effected by means
of about one hundred volumes, each exhibiting to the life about fifty
characters, and each character not only an individual in himself or
herself, but the representative--so we offer to prove if you be
sceptical--of a distinct class or order of human beings, from the
Monarch to the Mendicant, from the Queen to the Gypsy, from the Bruce to
the Moniplies, from Mary Stuart to Jenny Dennison. We shall never say
that Scott is Shakespeare: but we shall say that he has conceived and
created--you know the meaning of these words--as many characters--real
living flesh-and-blood human beings--naturally, truly, and consistently,
as Shakespeare; who, always transcendently great in pictures of the
passions--out of their range, which surely does not comprehend all
rational being--was--nay, do not threaten to murder us--not seldom an
imperfect delineator of human life. All the world believed that Sir
Walter had not only exhausted his own genius in his poetry, but that he
had exhausted all the matter of Scottish life--he and Burns
together--and that no more ground unturned-up lay on this side of the
Tweed. Perhaps he thought so too for a while--and shared in the general
and natural delusion. But one morning before breakfast it occurred to
him, that in all his poetry he had done little or nothing--though more
for Scotland than any other of her poets, except the Ploughman--and that
it would not be much amiss to commence a New Centu