of humour as you unhappily but undeniably were, you would miss, I fear,
the charm of 'Daisy Miller.' You would admit the unity of effect secured
in 'Washington Square,' though that effect is as remote as possible from
the terror of 'The House of Usher' or the vindictive triumph of 'The
Cask of Amontillado.'

Farewell, farewell, thou sombre and solitary spirit: a genius tethered
to the hack-work of the press, a gentleman among _canaille_, a poet
among poetasters, dowered with a scholar's taste without a scholar's
training, embittered by his sensitive scorn, and all unsupported by his
consolations.

XV. To Sir Walter Scott, Bart.

Rodono, St. Mary's Loch:
Sept. 5, 1885.

Sir,--In your biography it is recorded that you not only won the favour
of all men and women; but that a domestic fowl conceived an affection
for you, and that a pig, by his will, had never been severed from your
company. If some Circe had repeated in my case her favourite miracle
of turning mortals into swine, and had given me a choice, into that
fortunate pig, blessed among his race, would I have been converted! You,
almost alone among men of letters, still, like a living friend, win
and charm us out of the past; and if one might call up a poet, as the
scholiast tried to call Homer, from the shades, who would not, out of
all the rest, demand some hours of your society? Who that ever meddled
with letters, what child of the irritable race, possessed even a tithe
of your simple manliness, of the heart that never knew a touch of
jealousy, that envied no man his laurels, that took honour and wealth
as they came, but never would have deplored them had you missed both and
remained but the Border sportsman and the Border antiquary?

Were the word 'genial' not so much profaned, were it not misused in easy
good-nature, to extenuate lettered and sensual indolence, that worn old
term might be applied, above all men, to 'the Shirra.' But perhaps we
scarcely need a word (it would be seldom in use) for a character so
rare, or rather so lonely, in its nobility and charm as that of Walter
Scott. Here, in the heart of your own country, among your own grey
round-shouldered hills (each so like the other that the shadow of one
falling on its neighbour exactly outlines that neighbour's shape), it is
of you and of your works that a native of the Forest is most frequently
brought in mind. All the spirits of the river and the hill,