etimes thought to be loose and ill-defined, and he tells
us himself that he seldom knew where his story was carrying him. His
young heroes are sometimes reckoned rather feeble and featureless.
Francis Osbaldistone, like Edward Waverley and Henry Morton, drifts into
trouble and has his destiny shaped for him by other people and
accidents. But is this anything of a reproach to the author of the
story? Then it must tell against some novelists who seem to work more
conscientiously and carefully than Scott on the frame of their
story--against George Meredith in Evan Harrington and Richard Feverel
and Harry Richmond, all of whom are driven by circumstances and see
their way no more clearly than Scott's young men. Is it not really the
strength, not the weakness, of Scott's imagination that engages us in
the perplexities of Waverley and Henry Morton even to the verge of
tragedy--keeping out of tragedy because it is not his business, and
would spoil his looser, larger, more varied web of a story? Francis
Osbaldistone is less severely tried. His story sets him travelling, and
may we not admire the skill of the author who uses the old device of a
wandering hero with such good effect? The story is not a mere string of
adventures--it is adventures with a bearing on the main issue, with
complications that all tell in the end; chief among them, of course, the
successive appearances of Mr. Campbell and the counsels of Diana Vernon.
The scenes that bring out Scott's genius most completely--so they have
always seemed to me--are those of Francis Osbaldistone's stay in
Glasgow. Seldom has any novelist managed so easily so many different
modes of interest. There is the place--in different lights--the streets,
the river, the bridge, the Cathedral, the prison, seen through the
suspense of the hero's mind, rendered in the talk of Bailie Nicol Jarvie
and Andrew Fairservice; made alive, as the saying is, through successive
anxieties and dangers; thrilling with romance, yet at the same time
never beyond the range of ordinary common sense. Is it not a triumph, at
the very lowest reckoning, of dexterous narrative to bring together in a
vivid dramatic scene the humorous character of the Glasgow citizen and
the equal and opposite humour of his cousin, the cateran, the Highland
loon, Mr. Campbell disclosed as Rob Roy--with the Dougal creature
helping him?

Scott's comedy is like that of Cervantes in _Don Quixote_--humorous
dialogue independent of any