B."
had rather have written it than have written one-third of Scott's
novels. Let us take him at less than his word: he would rather have
written "A man's a man for a' that" than "Ivanhoe," "Redgauntlet," and
"The Heart of Midlothian."

_Ma sonties!_

CHARLES READE

March 10, 1894. "The Cloister and the Hearth."

There is a venerable proposition--I never heard who invented it--that
an author is finally judged by his best work. This would be comforting
to authors if true: but is it true? A day or two ago I picked up on a
railway bookstall a copy of Messrs. Chatto & Windus's new sixpenny
edition of _The Cloister and the Hearth_, and a capital edition it is.
I think I must have worn out more copies of this book than of any
other; but somebody robbed me of the pretty "Elzevir edition" as soon
as it came out, and so I have only just read Mr. Walter Besant's
Introduction, which the publishers have considerately reprinted and
thrown in with one of the cheapest sixpennyworths that ever came from
the press. Good wine needs no bush, and the bush which Mr. Besant
hangs out is a very small one. But one sentence at least has
challenged attention.

"I do not say that the whole of life, as it was at the end of the
fourteenth century, may be found in the _Cloister and the
Hearth_; but I do say that there is portrayed so vigorous,
lifelike, and truthful a picture of a time long gone by, and
differing, in almost every particular from our own, that the
world has never seen its like. To me it is a picture of the past
more faithful than anything in the works of Scott."

This last sentence--if I remember rightly--was called a very bold one
when it first appeared in print. To me it seems altogether moderate.
Go steadily through Scott, and which of the novels can you choose to
compare with the _Cloister_ as a "vigorous, lifelike, and truthful
picture of a time long gone by"?

Is it _Ivanhoe_?--a gay and beautiful romance, no doubt; but surely,
as the late Mr. Freeman was at pains to point out, not a "lifelike and
truthful picture" of any age that ever was. Is it _Old Mortality_?
Well, but even if we here get something more like a "vigorous,
lifelike, and truthful picture of a time gone by," we are bound to
consider the scale of the two books. Size counts, as Aristotle pointed
out, and as we usually forget. It is the whole of Western Europe that
Reade reconstructs for the groundwork of hi