an and the hillside;
Jeanie Deans in her perfect humbleness and truth. It would be vain to
attempt to name the new inhabitants of Scotland who appeared out of the
unseen wherever Scott moved. Neither to himself nor to his audience
could it seem that these friends of all were new created, invented by
any man. Scott, who alone could do it, withdrew the veil that had
concealed them. He opened up an entire country, a full world of men and
women, so living, so various, with their natural garb of fitting
language, and their heart of natural sentiment, and the thoughts which
they must have been thinking, by inalienable right of their humanity.
There might have been better plots or more carefully constructed
stories; as indeed in life, heaven knows, all our stories might be much
better constructed; but could we conceive it possible that these, our
country-folk and friends, could be dismissed again off the face of the
earth, how impoverished, how diminished, would Scotland be! The want of
them is more than we could contemplate, and we can well understand how
our country must have appeared to the world a poor little turbulent
country, without warmth or wealth, before these representatives of a
robust and manifold race were born.

Yet, amid the delightful enrichment of these productions to the nation
and the world, the man himself who produced them was perhaps the finest
revelation of all. And here he transcends for once the larger kindred
genius of whom we do not know, yet believe, that he was such a man as
Scott, though better off in one way and less well in others. Shakspeare
must have been somewhat oppressed with noble patrons, which Scott never
was--patrons to whom his own splendid courtesy and the magnifying
glamour in his poetic eyes must sometimes have made him more flattering
than was needful, overwhelming them with magnificent words; but on the
other hand he had not those modern drawbacks under which Scott's great
career was so bitterly burdened, the strain for money, the constant
combat with debt and liability. To bear the first yoke must have taken
much of a man's strength and tired him exceedingly: but to bear the
second is perhaps the severest test to which any buoyant spirit can be
put. And from the very beginning of his career as a novelist Scott had
this burden upon his shoulders. He bore the chains very lightly at first
with a hundred hairbreadth 'scapes which made the struggle--as even that
struggle can be made