ents them as infallibly
faithful and wise counselors,--incorruptibly just and pure
examples--strong always to sanctify, even when they cannot save.

59. Not as in any wise comparable in knowledge of the nature of
man,--still less in his understanding of the causes and courses of
fate,--but only as the writer who has given us the broadest view of the
conditions and modes of ordinary thought in modern society, I ask you
next to receive the witness of Walter Scott.

I put aside his merely romantic prose writings as of no value; and
though the early romantic poetry is very beautiful, its testimony is of
no weight, other than that of a boy's ideal. But his true works,
studied from Scottish life, bear a true witness; and, in the whole
range of these, there are but three men who reach the heroic
type[2]--Dandie Dinmont, Rob Roy, and Claverhouse; of these, one is a
border farmer; another a freebooter; the third a soldier in a bad
cause. And these touch the ideal of heroism only in their courage and
faith, together with a strong, but uncultivated, or mistakenly applied,
intellectual power; while his younger men are the gentlemanly
playthings of fantastic fortune, and only by aid (or accident) of that
fortune, survive, not vanquish, the trials they involuntarily sustain.
Of any disciplined, or consistent character, earnest in a purpose
wisely conceived, or dealing with forms of hostile evil, definitely
challenged, and resolutely subdued, there is no trace in his
conceptions of young men. Whereas in his imaginations of women,--in
the characters of Ellen Douglas, of Flora MacIvor, Rose Bradwardine,
Catherine Seyton, Diana Vernon, Lilias Redgauntlet, Alice Bridgenorth,
Alice Lee, and Jeanie Deans,--with endless varieties of grace,
tenderness, and intellectual power we find in all a quite infallible
and inevitable sense of dignity and justice; a fearless, instant, and
untiring self-sacrifice to even the appearance of duty, much more to
its real claims; and, finally, a patient wisdom of deeply restrained
affection, which does infinitely more than protect its objects from a
momentary error; it gradually forms, animates, and exalts the
characters of the unworthy lovers, until, at the close of the tale, we
are just able, and no more, to take patience in hearing of their
unmerited success. So that in all cases, with Scott as with
Shakespeare, it is the woman who watches over, teaches, and guides the
youth; it is never, by any chanc