as they are
affected by the public strifes and social divisions of the age. And this
it is which gives his books so large an interest for old and young,
soldiers and statesmen, the world of society and the recluse, alike. You
can hardly read any novel of Scott's and not become better aware what
public life and political issues mean. And yet there is no artificiality,
no elaborate attitudinizing before the antique mirrors of the past, like
Bulwer's, no dressing out of clothes-horses like G. P. R. James. The
boldness and freshness of the present are carried back into the past, and
you see Papists and Puritans, Cavaliers and Roundheads, Jews, Jacobites,
and freebooters, preachers, schoolmasters, mercenary soldiers, gipsies,
and beggars, all living the sort of life which the reader feels that in
their circumstances and under the same conditions of time and place and
parentage, he might have lived too. Indeed, no man can read Scott without
being more of a public man, whereas the ordinary novel tends to make its
readers rather less of one than before.

Next, though most of these stories are rightly called romances, no one
can avoid observing that they give that side of life which is
unromantic, quite as vigorously as the romantic side. This was not
true of Scott's poems, which only expressed one-half of his nature,
and were almost pure romances. But in the novels the business of life
is even better portrayed than its sentiments. Mr. Bagehot, one of the
ablest of Scott's critics, has pointed out this admirably in his essay
on _The Waverley Novels_. "Many historical novelists," he says,
"especially those who with care and pains have read up the detail, are
often evidently in a strait how to pass from their history to their
sentiment. The fancy of Sir Walter could not help connecting the two.
If he had given us the English side of the race to Derby, _he would
have described the Bank of England paying in sixpences, and also the
loves of the cashier_." No one who knows the novels well can question
this. Fergus MacIvor's ways and means, his careful arrangements for
receiving subsidies in black mail, are as carefully recorded as his
lavish highland hospitalities; and when he sends his silver cup to the
Gaelic bard who chaunts his greatness, the faithful historian does not
forget to let us know that the cup is his last, and that he is
hard-pressed for the generosities of the future. So too the habitual
thievishness of the highlanders