as he would have done at a stage-play or
a fencing-match, enjoying and applauding the skill exhibited, but
without feeling much ambition to parade himself as a rival either of
the foil or the buskin. I can easily believe, therefore, that in the
earlier part of his life--before the blaze of universal fame had
overawed {p.245} local prejudice, and a new generation, accustomed to
hear of that fame from their infancy, had grown up--it may have been
the commonly adopted creed in Edinburgh, that Scott, however
distinguished otherwise, was not to be named as a table-companion in
the same day with this or that master of luminous dissertation or
quick rejoinder, who now sleeps as forgotten as his grandmother. It
was natural enough that persons brought up in the same circle with
him, who remembered all his beginnings, and had but slowly learned to
acquiesce in the justice of his claim to unrivalled honor in
literature, should have clung all the closer for that late
acquiescence to their original estimate of him as inferior to
themselves in other titles to admiration. It was also natural that
their prejudice on that score should be readily taken up by the young
aspirants who breathed, as it were, the atmosphere of their
professional renown. Perhaps, too, Scott's steady Toryism, and the
effect of his genius and example in modifying the intellectual sway of
the long dominant Whigs in the north, may have had some share in this
matter. However all that may have been, the substance of what I had
been accustomed to hear certainly was, that Scott had a marvellous
stock of queer stories, which he often told with happy effect, but
that, bating these drafts on a portentous memory, set off with a
simple old-fashioned _naivete_ of humor and pleasantry, his strain of
talk was remarkable neither for depth of remark nor felicity of
illustration; that his views and opinions on the most important topics
of practical interest were hopelessly perverted by his blind
enthusiasm for the dreams of bygone ages; and that, but for the
grotesque phenomenon presented by a great writer of the nineteenth
century gravely uttering sentiments worthy of his own Dundees and
Invernahyles, the main texture of his discourse would be pronounced,
by any enlightened member of modern society, rather bald and poor than
otherwise. I think the epithet most in vogue was _commonplace_.

{p.246} It will easily be believed that, in companies such as I have
been alluding to, ma