1 common life than in others? The writer, at least, desires to submit this view as the possible solution of a difficult problem. Walter Scott, it will probably be agreed, ranks among the great of our race, both as a writer and as a man; but in his portrait, as in every true portrait, there are shadows. Some weakness is blended intimately with his strength; as we have noticed, he cannot escape “the weak side of his gifts." His wish was certainly to conceal his inner or poetical mind from the world. Perhaps he sometimes concealed it from himself. One fallacy hence arising (to return now to his commercial affairs), was an overestimate of his practical powers. "From beginning to end, he piqued himself on being a man of business." Against this it is probably enough to set the fact, that the books of his house were never fairly balanced till they were in the hands of his creditors. That the Ballantyne brothers had, each in his way, equally vague ideas on the matter, was known perfectly to Scott, who by 1812 found himself involved in his first difficulties. Then the vast success of the Novels once more floated the house: but although the partnership was enlarged by the admission of a really able commercial man, Constable the publisher, the reckless spirit which his adventurous nature brought with him, combined with the peculiar money-difficulties of 1825, only hastened the concluding bankruptcy of 1826. These twenty years of business, unsound from the outset, have supplied materials for a long dispute, with whom the fault justly rested. But enough has been here stated to explain the general case; we need not go further into a matter of which, with even more than usual truth, one might say that both sides were honestly wrong, and all, partners in a catastrophe for which all were responsible. The so-called men of business and plain commonsense, as we daily see, were not one atom more truly entitled to those epithets than the romantic Poet. But,-what had the "Ariosto of the North" to do in concerns like this? A probable element in the ultimate failure of the House of Ballantyne and Company was the fact that the partner with capital sedulously concealed himself from the public. The news that Scott was one of the firm startled the world far more than the news that he was the sole author of the “Waverley Novels." It is civious in how many ways this concealment must have hampered business. One reason of it was a certain pleasure in mystery, inherent in Scott's nature, and displayed also when "Triermain" and "Harold" were published. The wish was, that both of these poems should be taken for the work of his friend Erskine. In case of the Novels, however, the desire to escape the nuisance of commonplace praise and face-flattery was a further inducement. It was not so wise a motive that w-operated to prompt the commercial incognito. It might have been expected that he would have been led to avoid this by natural shrewdness, and "the thread of the attorney in him." But the peculiarity of Scott is that something dreamlike and imaginative, together with something practical and prosaic, unites in important phases of his life; past and present, romance and reality, all the more Those about Scott may have been already impressed, like Mrs. Cockburn, with his mental energy and determination to "know everything." But in the Autobiography he adopts another tone, which reappears in his later letters. He was conscious that industry had not come to him without a struggle. About one of his brothers he remarks, that he had "the same determined indolence that marked us all." No description could, at first sight, appear less applicable to himself. If there be one constant attribute of real genius, it is vast capacity for and enjoyment of labour. Genius often makes us feel that it is almost synonymous with patience, as Buffon and Reynolds called it. And it would be difficult to find a man of genius whose recorded works, -never more than a portion of the man's whole work,- -are more extensive and varied than Scott's. He had, in the highest degree, another charming quality, often, though not so essentially an attribute of intellectual excellence-Modesty. Hence, throughout his life he undervalued himself, and thought little of his own energy. Yet we cannot doubt that this "determined indolence," like the irritability of temper which he so subdued that few suspected its existence, was a real element in his nature. At school (1778-1783), Scott's zeal for study is inferior to the ardour of Shelley; he takes not the slightest interest in what is not only the most perfect, but the most essentially "romantic" of literatures,-that of Greece; even in Latin going only far enough to set the highest value upon the modern verse of Buchanan, and after him, on Lucan and Claudian. He was satisfied with a working knowledge of French, German, Italian, and Spanish. Perhaps the family failing expended itself in confining his studies to the circle marked out by strong creative impulse, the history, manners, romances, and poetry of mediaeval and modern Europe. Looking back now at the result, the Poems and the Novels, one is inclined to say that Scott in all this followed the imperious promptings of nature. This, however, was not his own judgment. He regretted nothing more bitterly than his want of the severe classical training. "I forgot the very letters of the Greek alphabet," he says in the Autobiography of 1808, "a loss never to be repaired, considering what that language is, and who they were who employed it in their compositions." And again, "I would at this moment give half the reputation I have had the good fortune to acquire, if by doing so I could rest the remaining part upon a sound foundation." Within the range noticed, however, his "appetite for books was as ample and undiscriminating as it was indefatigable; few ever read so much," he adds, or to so little purpose." Spenser, Tasso's "Jerusalem" in the English, "above all, Bishop Percy's Reliques of Ancient Poetry," are specified; and although throughout his life Scott exhibited a reluctance to employ his powerful mind on subjects requiring hard thought, and was disposed to defer any work upon which he was engaged to the last, yet in the main we may regard the "determined indolence" as absorbed into the meditative atmosphere (if we may use the word) of the poetical nature: as the undersoil whence so many masterpieces of imaginative writing were destined to grow. There is a strong general likeness on this point between Scott and the greatest of his contemporaries in poetry: and the words in which Wordsworth described himself would have borne an equal application to his friend :— : My whole life I have lived in pleasant thought, As if life's business were a summer mood. "My life," Scott himself says, in one of the most remarkable passages of his Diary (Dec. 27, 1825), “though not without its fits of waking and strong exertion, has been a sort of dream, spent in Chewing the cud of sweet and bitter fancy. I have worn a wishing-cap, the power of which has been to divert present griefs by a touch of the wand of imagination, and gild over the future by prospects more fair than can be realized." Scott's character was essentially formed and finished in early youth, and these words may be considered the key to his whole career and character. Worldly wisdom, love of social rank, passion for lands and goods ; - these are the motives by which it has been often assumed that he was guided. Mr. Carlyle even appears in his remarkable Essay to regard Scott as unentitled to the claim of greatness, because he did not throw his strength into grasping the problems of modern life or the eternal difficulties of human thought,-and treats him as an eminently genial and healthy man of the world, whose writings were rather pieces of skilful and rapid manufacture for the day, than likely to prove "heirlooms for ever." But so "antithetically mixed" was his nature, that at the same time he was in the spirit hidden away with poetry and the past, and moving among romantic worlds of his own creation. Viewed from one side, Scott, as printer and lawyer, with "a thread of the attorney in him," as "laird" and man of society, appears in unromantic contrast to most of his "brothers in immortal verse:" viewed from another, it may be doubted whether any of his contemporaries lived the life of the poet so completely. A strong capacity for such work as his nature secretly preferred, and towards which he was unconsciously finding his way, marks the boyhood of Scott. This found its main exercise at first in a love for inventing and relating marvellous tales which amounted to real passion. "Whole holidays were spent in this pastime, which continued for two or three years, and had, I believe, no small effect in directing the turn of my imagination to the chivalrous and romantic in poetry and prose." "He used to interest us," writes a lady who was then his playmate, “by telling us the visions, as he called them, which he had lying alone. . . . Child as I was, I could not help being highly delighted with his description of the glories he had seen.... Recollecting these descriptions," of which we cannot but regret that she preserved no memorial, "radiant as they were, I have often thought since, that there must have been a bias in his mind to superstition-the marvellous seemed to have such power over him, though the mere offspring of his own imagination, that the expression of his face, habitually that of genuine benevolence, mingled with a shrewd innocent humour, changed greatly while he was speaking of these things, and showed a deep intenseness of feeling, as if he were awed even by his own recital." Scott, as he was throughout life, is again before us in this little delineation; the kindness, the superstition, the shrewdness: and one already sees "Waverley" and "Lammermoor" in their infancy. Meanwhile that other element of poetry which is only second in Scott's writings to the picture of human life, -the natural landscape,-began to assert its influence over him. Actors were thronging fast within the theatre of his imagination; the first sketches of the background and scenery for the drama were now supplied. From a visit to Kelso, "the most beautiful, if not the most romantic village in Scotland," Scott traced his earliest consciousness of the magic of Nature. Wordsworth's passion was for the Visions of the hills And Souls of lonely places. The passion of Scott differed from this through the leading place which historical memories held in his heart. "The romantic feelings which I have described as predominating in my mind gradually rested upon and associated themselves with the grand features of the landscape around me; and the historical incidents or traditional legends connected with many of them gave to my admiration a sort of intense impression of reverence, which at times made my heart feel too big for its bosom. From this time the love of natural beauty, more especially when combined with ancient ruins, or remains of our fathers' piety or splendour, became with me an insatiable passion, which I would willingly have gratified by travelling over half the globe." Scott's transfer from the Edinburgh High School to the College (1783-1786), probably gave him the first freedom to indulge this impulse within bounds which, though narrow in themselves, were of inexhaustible interest to his sympathetic imagination. Without "travelling over half the globe" he could create a realm of his own, sufficient for himself and for his readers. It is astonishing to look at the map, and observe within how small a radius from Edin burgh the hundred little places lie which he has made familiar names throughout the whole civilized world.-We have noticed that Scott's father, (with himself in youth,) is painted in " Redgauntlet." Nothing was ever better contrasted in romance than these two characters; and one sees that the real Alan Fairford was already beginning at college those adventurous ways which may have made the old Writer to the Signet feel that the wild moss-trooping blood of Harden was once more at work within the veins of his gallant boy. A wise confidence left Walter free. He wandered for days together over the historical sites of the neighbourhood, and when at home, in lieu of devotion to the prosaic mysteries of the Scottish law, was able to please his fancy by founding that collection of wayside songs and historical relics which filled so large a space in the innocent happiness of his after-years, and was not less a necessary of life to him than his cabinet of rocks and minerals is to the geologist. The mode in which Scott observed Nature is strictly parallel to his representation of human life. As he rarely enters into the depths of character, preferring to exhibit it through action, and painting rather the great general features of an age than dwelling on the details for their own sake, so he mainly deals with the landscape; two or three admirable pictures excepted. Compare his descriptions with those by Wordsworth, Keats, or Shelley, and the difference in regard to the points noted will be felt at once. Scott was aware of this. "I was unable," says the AutoLiography, "with the eye of a painter to dissect the various parts of the scene, to comprehend how the one bore upon the other. . . . I have never, indeed, been capable of doing this with precision or nicety." A curious testimony is borne to the truth of this remark by Scott's failure (like Goethe's) to master even the rudiments of landscape drawing. “Even the humble ambition, which I long cherished, of making sketches of those places which interested me, from a defect of eye or of hand was totally ineffectual." But this absence of power over landscape forms was compensated for by a singularly fine perception of colour, examples of which have been given by Mr. Ruskin in the interesting criticisms on Scott contained in his "Modern Painters." Scott's almost total want of ear for music as a calamity which he shared with a large number of great poets; the strong se of the melody in words and the harmonies of rhythm appearing to leave no space in their organization for inarticulate music. -Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard if true at all, is true only of the poet. Beside the irresistible impulse which directed Scott's reading to "romantic" and poetical literature, to story-telling, and to country wanderings, he was seriously imeded by illness from pursuing his college studies. And by the time the Academical ourse was concluded, the passion which governed his youth, and perhaps ecretly coloured the complexion of his future life, had already fallen upon him. Little has been told of this early love: force of feeling, and force to repress the gts of feeling, are two of the principal elements in Scott's character; he undergoes vil with a pathetic simplicity; he suffers in silence. From what, however, we can earn, it is natural to read in the "love that never found his earthly close" the true rce of that peculiar shade of pensive melancholy which runs like a silver thread rough almost everything he wrote, is heard as a "far-off Aeolian note in all his b |