t the result will show. Such a monument a
hundred yards in height would be one of the finest things perhaps in
Europe.

What has Sir Walter done for Scotland, to deserve so gorgeous a
monument? Assuredly not all he might have done; and yet he has done
much--more, in some respects, than any other merely literary man
the country ever produced. He has interested Europe in the national
character, and in some corresponding degree in the national
welfare; and this of itself is a very important matter indeed.
Shakespeare--perhaps the only writer who, in the delineation of
character, takes precedence of the author of _Waverley_--seems to
have been less intensely imbued with the love of country. It is quite
possible for a foreigner to luxuriate over his dramas, as the Germans
are said to do, without loving Englishmen any the better in
consequence, or respecting them any the more. But the European
celebrity of the fictions of Sir Walter must have had the inevitable
effect of raising the character of his country,--its character as a
country of men of large growth, morally and intellectually. Besides,
it is natural to think of foreigners as mere abstractions; and hence
one cause at least of the indifference with which we regard them,--an
indifference which the first slight misunderstanding converts into
hostility. It is something towards a more general diffusion of
goodwill to be enabled to conceive of them as men with all those
sympathies of human nature, on which the corresponding sympathies
lay hold, warm and vigorous about them. Now, in this aspect has Sir
Walter presented his countrymen to the world. Wherever his writings
are known, a Scotsman can be no mere abstraction; and in both
these respects has the poet and novelist deserved well of his
country.

Within the country itself, too, his great nationality, like that of
Burns, has had a decidedly favourable effect. The cosmopolism so
fashionable among a certain class about the middle of the last
century, was but a mock virtue, and a very dangerous one. The 'citizen
of the world,' if he be not a mere pretender, is a man to be defined
by negatives. It is improper to say he loves all men alike: he is
merely equally indifferent to all. Nothing can be more absurd than to
oppose the love of country to the love of race. The latter exists but
as a wider diffusion of the former. Do we not know that human nature,
in its absolute perfection, and blent with the absolute and infinite
p