rest of the world. They met often, and exchanged gifts; Scott conferring on Byron a beautiful Turkish dagger, mounted with gold, and Byron reciprocating by the present of a large sepulchral vase of silver, full of Grecian bones. Byron had a singular superstition about the ill omen connected with sharp-pointed objects, as gifts, and once returned a splendid pin presented him by Lady Blessington, on this account; and it is a wonder that he retained Scott's dagger, which, by the by, seemed, like that fatal air-drawn dagger in " Macbeth," to "marshal the way" to the disastrous catastrophe of the poet's separation from his wife, and exile from his country, to occur a few months afterwards. On Scott's return from Paris, he had a parting interview with Byron at Long's, where the latter bard was as 66 playful as a kitten." They never met again, although they continued friends and correspondents to the close of Byron's life. Scott watched with the deepest interest the fluctuating, but brilliant career of his friend; he did him good service in the darkest hour of his life, by defending him in the Quarterly against the howl of the whole world, and anticipated much from his matured and sobered genius, and from his expedition to Greece. Scott is one of the few men of whom Byron speaks uniformly well, and he was never weary of devouring his novels. It is singular, that the two men of genius in the age most opposite in temperament to Scott, seemed to have read him with the greatest avidity, and to have found in his novels the best anodyne for their habitual gloom: Foster and Byron.

At this period, too, Scott dined twice with the Prince Regent, and narrowly escaped betraying his connexion with the Scotch Novels, in reply to a toast proposed by the Prince. He thought highly of the Prince's manners, but was too acute a judge of human nature to be blind to that selfish heartlessness, which elegance of address decorated, but was unable to disguise; although far too thorough a Tory openly to acknowledge this. He returned to Edinburgh on the 22d of May.

A month afterwards the cannon of Waterloo startled every ear, and the Empire of the Hundred Days and its founder sank with a shock which echoed through the world. While

Robert Hall was saying in England that this event had put the clock of the world several degrees backward, our poet in Scotland was exulting, and straining on the slip to visit the memorable field-partly for the purpose of gratifying his curiosity, and partly to find a new theme, and out of that Aceldama to gather new inspiration for his genius. In company with some neighbours and friends, he started for the Continent in July, having made a previous arrangement with Constable to describe his tour in a series of letters. He visited Brussels, Waterloo, Paris; and met a flattering reception from Wellington, Blucher, the Emperor Alexander of Russia, and others of the magnates of the earth who were then dancing their giddy and guilty dance over what the poet calls "The last hopes of trampled France." It was, both here and on the Continent, a time of joy amounting to foolish and wicked delirium, in which Scott participated to an extent that seems to have weakened his powers; for although his "Paul's Letters" are graphic and interesting, his poem on "Waterloo," which appeared in October, is a failure: the true laureate of that field was not to pass through it till the next year, in the shape of a pallid and defiant youth of twenty-eight, hurrying on his way from an angry country, first to the snows of the Alps, and then to the stews of Venice. Scott at that period was too happy and triumphant a man to write well on the gloomier and sublimer aspects of war. Spirit of the spot, where "another Golgotha had been memorised," and where

"That red rain had made the harvest grow,"

The

was to lead Byron to it, and to tell HIM to limn it in the everlasting chiaroscuro of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage." Scott returned to Abbotsford in September, passing by and examining the old castles of Warwick and Kenilworth, on his homeward way. Nothing else of much consequence occurred in his history during the remainder of the year, except that he seems to have written about the end of it a few pages of "The Antiquary."

Early in 1816, he published "Paul's Letters to his Kins

Six

folk," which was well but not rapturously received: it should have, perhaps, been published earlier. In May, 'his brother John, a harmless old half-pay officer, somewhat resembling the Matthew Henderson of Burns, died. "The Antiquary appeared the same month, and although not quite so much admired at first as the former two, soon rose to its level. thousand copies of it were sold in as many days. It had not the high historic character of "Waverley," nor the unique yet varied charm of "Guy Mannering;" but in certain scenes and passages surpassed aught in either of them. The storm. scene has seldom been equalled in power of language and thrilling interest of incident; and who that has ever wandered in a storm along the romantic rocks and caves to the eastward of Arbroath, and witnessed the wild Waterloo of contest between the insurgent waves and the shattered but strong crags of that iron-bound coast, can fail to admire such sentences as this, "The spray of the billows flew as high as their temporary place of refuge, and the stunning sound with which they dashed against the rocks beneath, seemed as if they still demanded the fugitives in accents of thunder, as their destined prey"? It is curious, however, that he has marred an otherwise magnificent passage by the gross blunder of making the sun set in the German Ocean; and more curious still that no critic or friend, not even the "inevitable eye" of James Ballantyne, seems to have detected the mistake, till it was too late to have it amended by the author. Scott no doubt practised in his descriptions the art of COMPOSITION; but that art has its limits, and he might as well have painted palms in Glencoe, or bananas growing in Balquhidder, as describe the sun seen from the eastern coast of Scotland sinking in the sea. Edie Ochiltree is one of the very happiest of its author's creations, in his combination of humour, kindliness, and auld-farrand sense, of pawkiness and of poetry. The tale of Martin Waldeck excites the wish that Scott had more frequently entered on the regions of the mystical and supernatural. But by far the most original and Shaksperian portions of the book, are the scenes in the fisherman's cottage. The funeral is a masterpiece of pathos and picturesque effect; and old Elspeth

Mucklebackit is a character resembling the style of Crabbe, but tinged with an imagination, and shown in a weird light which that poet could not command. With no supernaturalism about her, she becomes more terrific than the witches of Shakspeare themselves, through the sheer power with which her malevolent passions, blended with a wild sublimity of feeling and language, are depicted.

Scarcely had "The Antiquary" left his hands, than he planned the "Tales of My Landlord," commenced " Harold the Dauntless," projected a series of "Letters on the History of Scotland," never to be completed, and undertook to write. the historical department of the "Edinburgh Annual Register." For certain personal reasons, he offered his new novel, not to Constable, but to Murray and Blackwood. William Blackwood, a man of rare penetration and rough directness of speech, found fault with some parts of the "Black Dwarf," an interference which provoked Scott to tell him, that he belonged to the Black Hussars of Literature, who neither gave nor took quarter. This being out of Scott's usually measured style, had a proportionate effect, and told like thunder from a cloudless sky. The "Tales of my Landlord" appeared in December 1816, and the reception of the first tale showed that the sagacious bibliopole was right. "The Black Dwarf" was thought to begin delightfully, but to come to a lame and impotent conclusion. "Old Mortality," while bearing up its weaker brother, and challenging a place instantly amongst Scott's proudest works, gave great and deadly offence to the majority of the religious classes of Scotland. Dr M'Crie, in a succession of very able and eloquent papers in the Edinburgh Christian Instructor, assailed its statements, and went nigh to impugn the integrity of its author's motives. Scott at first resolved to remain silent, but finding the impression strong and general, wrote a reply to the Doctor in the somewhat equivocal form of a review of his own work in the Quarterly. We are disposed, looking back at the controversy from the distance of forty years, to think that the truth lay between the contending parties. Scott had undoubtedly an animus

against the Covenanters, and has here and there caricatured their oddities and darkened their faults to a dye deeper than the truth. But, as a whole, his book is a faithful as well as a broad and brilliant picture of the period, and his satire was directed chiefly against the extreme left of the party, whose deeds and language at times were only to be justified on the plea of that insanity which oppression produces even in the wise. His whitewashing of Claverhouse is more culpable, because less sustained by historical fact. Burley is very much the Burley of the "Scots Worthies," but Claverhouse in "Old Mortality" is a pure fiction, and we think a failure as well as a falsehood, since the contrarieties in his character are monstrous, and they are not thoroughly reconciled. How illmanaged, too, the plea he makes to Morton for his murders. He says that there is a difference between his spilling the blood of muddy peasants and crack-brained weavers, and Burley's killing of prelates, lords, and commanders—as if obviously the latter were not the higher occupation of the two, supposing both were equally just or equally unjust! It is not necessary to dwell on the literary merits of the book. Not so humane or uniformly delightful as many of his other fictions, it surpasses all of them, even perhaps "Ivanhoe," in sustained, conscious, and rejoicing power, and contains at the same time descriptive passages which for the blending of moral with material grandeur, are incomparable. We remember nothing in romance equal to the cave-scene with Burley, except the storm in "The Antiquary," and that, although as powerful in writing, wants the intensity of human interest— since what comparison between the old weather-beaten beggar, the hero of the one, and the dark-souled homicide of the other, who has retired from men to the company of devils, and who can match in the fierce passions of his own breast that "hell of waters" which is perpetually thundering around him?

In a short time after appeared "Harold the Dauntless." It enjoyed a moderate degree of success. On the 5th of March, Scott was seized with severe cramp in the stomach, a disease which recurred at intervals for more than two years,