fragment, and the Moses of Michael Angelo a hint. Their campaigns and
battles are always called triumphant, while Caesar and Cromwell wept for
many humiliations. And the end of it all is the hell of no resistance,
the hell of an unfathomable softness, until the whole nature recoils
into madness and the chamber of civilisation is no longer merely a
cushioned apartment, but a padded cell.

This last and worst of human miseries Savonarola saw afar off, and bent
his whole gigantic energies to turning the chariot into another course.
Few men understood his object; some called him a madman, some a
charlatan, some an enemy of human joy. They would not even have
understood if he had told them, if he had said that he was saving them
from a calamity of contentment which should be the end of joys and
sorrows alike. But there are those to-day who feel the same silent
danger, and who bend themselves to the same silent resistance. They also
are supposed to be contending for some trivial political scruple.

Mr M'Hardy says, in defending Savonarola, that the number of fine works
of art destroyed in the Burning of the Vanities has been much
exaggerated. I confess that I hope the pile contained stacks of
incomparable masterpieces if the sacrifice made that one real moment
more real. Of one thing I am sure, that Savonarola's friend Michael
Angelo would have piled all his own statues one on top of the other, and
burnt them to ashes, if only he had been certain that the glow
transfiguring the sky was the dawn of a younger and wiser world.

THE POSITION OF SIR WALTER SCOTT

Walter Scott is a writer who should just now be re-emerging into his own
high place in letters, for unquestionably the recent, though now
dwindling, schools of severely technical and aesthetic criticism have
been unfavourable to him. He was a chaotic and unequal writer, and if
there is one thing in which artists have improved since his time, it is
in consistency and equality. It would perhaps be unkind to inquire
whether the level of the modern man of letters, as compared with Scott,
is due to the absence of valleys or the absence of mountains. But in any
case, we have learnt in our day to arrange our literary effects
carefully, and the only point in which we fall short of Scott is in the
incidental misfortune that we have nothing particular to arrange.

It is said that Scott is neglected by modern readers; if so, the matter
could be more appropriately describ