what" about Chivalry and Feudalism, besides that it will fade fast enough as we get a better, was not picked up at random, or without an amount of acquaintance with the materials that was in his time rather uncommon.

What in Scott's Gothicism and Mediævalism is false arises, I believe, from a certain defect in his genius, which would have produced, and perhaps did produce, corresponding falsity in his imaginations out of the Gothic and mediæval regions altogether-to wit, his deficiency in the purely speculative faculty. The only Scottish thing that Scott had not in him was Scotch metaphysics. His mind was not of the investigating, or philosophic, or speculative type; he was not, in the distinctive sense of the term, a thinker. Craniologists see this defect, they tell us, in the very shape of his head-high above the ears, but not long from back to front. Whether the defect was in his head or in his thumbs, there it was, and it produced its consequences. It is in this most conspicuously that he falls short of Shakespeare. It is owing to this that, in so many of his more stately and ambitious characters-as when he tries to paint a Cromwell or a Raleigh, or a Queen Elizabeth, or a Louis the Eleventh, or an enthusiastic mediæval monk-it seems as if he could but give a certain exte

rior account of the physiognomy, costume, and gesture, but had no power to work from the inner mind outwards, so as to make the characters live. He cannot get at the mode of thinking of such personages; indeed the notion of a “mode of thinking" as belonging to persons, or to ages, and to be seized in representing them, was not very familiar to him. If he did not reproduce the earnest and powerful thought of the mediæval period, its real feelings and beliefs, it was because his philosophy of the human mind and of human history was not so deep and subtle as to make feelings, beliefs, and modes of thought, the objects of his anxious imagination. But, if he failed in representing a great and peculiar mind of the historical past, he would equally have failed, and for the same reason, in representing a great and peculiar mind of the historical present. This is a feat, indeed, to which I do not think we can boast that many of our writers of prose fiction have been, at any time, competent.

The wonder is that Scott, notwithstanding his defect, succeeded so marvellously where he did succeed. Need I say where that is? Do we not feel that in his representations of homely and even of striking and heroic Scottish characters (with the exception already implied, and accounted for, of his Presby

terians and Covenanters), in a period of Scottish society near to his own time-in his representations of Scottish life and Scottish humours, nay of Scottish beliefs and modes of thinking in the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries (repeat the exception, at least partially) or even farther back still, where his shrewd observations of present human nature could co-operate with his antiquarian knowledge in filling out a social picture—he was simply as successful as it was possible to be? Are not his Davie Gellatlys, his Dandie Dinmonts, his Counsellor Pleydells, his Oldbucks, his Saunders Mucklebackets, his Edie Ochiltrees, his Cuddie Headriggs, his Nicol Jarvies, his Caleb Balderstones, his Dugald Dalgettys, his Meg Doddses, and the like-nay, in a more tragic and elevated order, are not his Meg Merrilieses, his Rob Roys, his Redgauntlets, his Jeannie Deanses- -as perfect creations as any in literature? These, and especially the homelier characters, are simply as well done as they could possibly be; and, in their conception and execution, I do not know that Scott is inferior to Shakespeare. Is it that in such cases his Scottish heart and his poetic instinct, acting on what he saw and knew, whirled him beyond his conscious power of speculation; or is it that, after all, there was a speculative faculty in Scott which he had not worked ?

From the shrewdness and sagacity of some of his critical prefaces to his novels, where he discusses principles of literature without seeming to call them such, I am sometimes tempted to believe the latter.

And so, after all, Scott is greatest in his Scotticism. It is as a painter of Scottish nature and Scottish life, an interpreter of Scottish beliefs and Scottish feelings, a narrator of Scottish history, that he attains to the height of his genius. He has Scotticized European literature. He has interested the world in the little land. It had been heard of before; it had given the world some reason to be interested in it before; with, at no time, more than a million and a half of souls in it, it had spoken and acted with some emphasis in relation to the bigger nations around it. But, since Scott, the Thistle, till then a wayside weed, has had a great promotion in universal botany, and blooms, less prickly than of yore, but the identical Thistle still, in all the gardens of the world. All round the globe the little land is famous; tourists flock to it to admire its scenery, while they shoot its game; and afar off, when the kilted regiments do British work, and the pibroch shrills them to the work they do, and men, marking what they do, ask whence they come, the answer is "From the land of Scott."

"O Caledonia, stern and wild,

Meet nurse for a poetic child !"

sang Scott long ago. Caledonia nursed him, and he has repaid the nursing. And this man was born amongst you! This city gave him birth. All Scotland claims him, but here he had his peculiar home. Nor was he ultimus Scotorum, nor the last of the men of Edinburgh. You have since had among you, born among you or naturalized among you from other parts of Scotland, other specimens of the national breed-Jeffrey, Chalmers, Wilson, Miller, Hamilton. Nature abhors duplicates; and though in all of these there was an element of characteristic Scotticism, and this was a source of their strength, all of them were men by themselves, powerful by reason of their independent mould and structure, and not one of them a repetition of Scott. This is as it should be. Scotticism is not one invariable thing, fixed and intransmutable. It does not consist merely in vaunting and proclaiming itself, in working in Scottish facts, Scottish traditions, Scottish reminiscences-all of which has perhaps been done enough; it may be driven inwards; it may exist internally as a mode of thought; and there may be efficient Scotticism where not one word is said of the Thistle, and where the language