t it is not,
in former divinities, thought the will of Providence that he should be
dropped by a shot from a client behind his fire-screen, and retrieved in
the morning by his housemaid under the chandelier. Neither is Lady
Dedlock less reprehensible in her conduct than many women of fashion
have been and will be: but it would not therefore have been thought
poetically just, in old-fashioned morality, that she should be found by
her daughter lying dead, with her face in the mud of a St. Giles's
churchyard.

10. In the work of the great masters death is always either heroic,
deserved, or quiet and natural (unless their purpose be totally and
deeply tragic, when collateral meaner death is permitted, like that of
Polonius or Roderigo). In "Old Mortality," four of the deaths,
Bothwell's, Ensign Grahame's, Macbriar's, and Evandale's, are
magnificently heroic; Burley's and Oliphant's long deserved, and swift;
the troopers', met in the discharge of their military duty, and the old
miser's as gentle as the passing of a cloud, and almost beautiful in its
last words of--now unselfish--care.

* * * * *

"Ailie" (he aye ca'd me Ailie, we were auld acquaintance), "Ailie, take
ye care and hand the gear weel thegither; for the name of Morton of
Milnwood's gane out like the last sough of an auld sang." And sae he
fell out o' ae dwam into another, and ne'er spak a word mair, unless it
something we you'dna mak out, about a dipped candle being gude eneugh
to see to dee wi'. He cou'd ne'er bide to see a molded ane, and there
was ane, by ill luck, on the table.

* * * * *

In "Guy Mannering," the murder, though unpremeditated, of a single
person, (himself not entirely innocent, but at least by heartlessness in
a cruel function earning his fate,) is avenged to the uttermost on all
the men conscious of the crime; Mr. Bertram's death, like that of his
wife, brief in pain, and each told in the space of half a dozen lines;
and that of the heroine of the tale, self-devoted, heroic in the
highest, and happy.

Nor is it ever to be forgotten, in the comparison of Scott's with
inferior work, that his own splendid powers were, even in early life,
tainted, and in his latter years destroyed, by modern conditions of
commercial excitement, then first, but rapidly, developing themselves.
There are parts even in his best novels colored to meet tastes which he
despised; and many pages writ