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ouse of Wisdom of Cairo, and with the Templars; and if Scott's gypsy Hayraddin Maugrabin is to be supposed one of that type of Hindu outcasts, which were of all others most hateful to the orthodox Moslem invader, we cannot sufficiently admire the appropriateness with which doctrines which were actually held by the most deeply initiated among the Pariahs were put into his mouth. To have made a merely vulgar, nothing-believing, and as little reflecting gypsy, as philosophical as the wanderer in 'Quentin Durward,' would have been absurd. There is a vigor, an earnestness in his creed, which betrays culture and thought, and which is marvellously appropriate if we regard him as a wandering scion of the outcast Pariah illuminati of India. Did our author owe this insight to erudition or to poetic intuition? In either case we discover a depth which few would have surmised. It was once said of Scott, that he was a millionaire of genius whose wealth was all in small change--that his scenes and characters were all massed from a vast collection of little details. This would be equivalent to declaring that he was a great novelist without a great idea. Perhaps this is true, but the clairvoyance of genius which _seems_ to manifest itself in the two characters which I have already examined, and the cautious manner in which he has treated them, would appear to prove that he possessed a rarer gift than that of 'great ideas'--the power of controlling them. Such ideas may make reformers, critics, politicians, essayists--but they generally ruin a novelist--and Scott knew it. A third character belonging to the class under consideration, is Henbane Dwining, the 'pottingar,' apothecary or 'leech,' in the novel of 'The Fair Maid of Perth.' This man is rather developed by his deeds than his words, and these are prompted by two motives, terrible vindictiveness and the pride of superior knowledge. He is vile from the former, and yet almost heroic from the latter, for it is briefly impossible to make any man intensely self-reliant, and base this self-reliance on great learning in men and books, without displaying in him some elements of superiority. He is so radically bad that by contrast one of the greatest villains in Scottish history, Sir John Ramorney, appears rather gray than black; and yet we dislike him less than the knight, possibly because we know that men of the Dwining stamp, when they have had the control of nations, often do good s
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