t is a perfect library in himself. A
constant reader of romances would find that it needed months to go
through even the best pieces of the inexhaustible painter of eight
full centuries and every type of man, and he might repeat the process
of reading him ten times in a lifetime without a sense of fatigue or
sameness.

The poetic beauty of Scott's creations is almost the least of his
great qualities. It is the universality of his sympathy that is so
truly great, the justice of his estimates, the insight into the spirit
of each age, his intense absorption of self in the vast epic of human
civilization. What are the old almanacs that they so often give us as
histories beside these living pictures of the ordered succession of
ages? As in Homer himself, we see in this prose "Iliad" of modern
history the battle of the old and the new, the heroic defense of
ancient strongholds, the long impending and inevitable doom of
medieval life. Strong men and proud women struggle against the destiny
of modern society, unconsciously working out its ways, undauntedly
defying its power. How just is our island Homer! Neither Greek nor
Trojan sways him; Achilles is his hero; Hector is his favorite; he
loves the councils of chiefs and the palace of Priam; but the
swineherd, the charioteer, the slave girl, the hound, the beggar, and
the herdsman, all glow alike in the harmonious coloring of his peopled
epic. We see the dawn of our English nation, the defense of
Christendom against the Koran, the grace and the terror of feudalism,
the rise of monarchy out of baronies, the rise of parliaments out of
monarchy, the rise of industry out of serfage, the pathetic ruin of
chivalry, the splendid death struggle of Catholicism, the sylvan
tribes of the mountain (remnants of our prehistoric forefathers)
beating themselves to pieces against the hard advance of modern
industry; we see the grim heroism of the Bible martyrs, the
catastrophe of feudalism overwhelmed by a practical age which knew
little of its graces and almost nothing of its virtues.

Such is Scott, who, we may say, has done for the various phases of
modern history what Shakespeare has done for the manifold types of
human character. And this glorious and most human and most historical
of poets, without whom our very conception of human development would
have ever been imperfect, this manliest and truest and widest of
romancers we neglect for some hothouse hybrid of psychological
analysis, f