t respected it. 'Chaque chose avait
son nom,'[158] and the severest of English moralists recognises the
accurate wit, the lofty intellect, and the unfretted benevolence, which
redeemed from vitiated surroundings the circle of d'Alembert and
Marmontel.[159]

I have said, with too slight praise, that the vainest, in those days,
'believed' in virtue. Beautiful and heroic examples of it were always
before them; nor was it without the secret significance attaching to
what may seem the least accidents in the work of a master, that Scott
gave to both his heroines of the age of revolution in England the name
of the queen of the highest order of English chivalry.[160]

It is to say little for the types of youth and maid which alone Scott
felt it a joy to imagine, or thought it honourable to portray, that they
act and feel in a sphere where they are never for an instant liable to
any of the weaknesses which disturb the calm, or shake the resolution,
of chastity and courage in a modern novel. Scott lived in a country and
time, when, from highest to lowest, but chiefly in that dignified and
nobly severe[161] middle class to which he himself belonged, a habit of
serene and stainless thought was as natural to the people as their
mountain air. Women like Rose Bradwardine and Ailie Dinmont were the
grace and guard of almost every household (God be praised that the race
of them is not yet extinct, for all that Mall or Boulevard can do), and
it has perhaps escaped the notice of even attentive readers that the
comparatively uninteresting character of Sir Walter's heroes had always
been studied among a class of youths who were simply incapable of doing
anything seriously wrong; and could only be embarrassed by the
consequences of their levity or imprudence.

But there is another difference in the woof of a Waverley novel from the
cobweb of a modern one, which depends on Scott's larger view of human
life. Marriage is by no means, in his conception of man and woman, the
most important business of their existence;[162] nor love the only
reward to be proposed to their virtue or exertion. It is not in his
reading of the laws of Providence a necessity that virtue should, either
by love or any other external blessing, be rewarded at all;[163] and
marriage is in all cases thought of as a constituent of the happiness of
life, but not as its only interest, still less its only aim. And upon
analysing with some care the motives of his principal stor