After the death of Sir Walter Scott in 1832, a private journal of his, extending over the greater part of the last seven years of his life, and consisting of two thick vellum-bound volumes of close writing, carefully clasped and locked, came into the hands of his son-in-law Lockhart, to be used at his discretion for the biography of his great relative. Accordingly, when that biography was published in 1837, the last portion of it contained a large selection of extracts from this Diary. Naturally, however, the matter in many places being of a kind which it would have been premature then to make public, it was only a selection that could be given by Lockhart. For more than half a century, therefore, the original manuscript volumes have remained at Abbotsford, waiting for the time when it should be judged fit to make that more complete publication of their contents which Scott himself had contemplated as inevitable at some time or other. The time has now arrived; and one of the most interesting literary events of the present season is the publication, by Mr. David Douglas of Edinburgh, of the great Sir Walter’s Journal in perfect form and with all requisite annotations.

The Journal is a record, in the first place, of indomitable manliness, and of prodigious industry. When it was begun, in November 1825, Scott was at the very height of his enormous prosperity and popularity. He had not advanced far in it, however,—had not, in fact, got through the first month of his entries in it,—when there came upon him the ominous signs of that commercial crash in which he and his fortunes were to be overwhelmed. In several entries, day after day, there are anticipations of this disaster, mixed with still struggling hopes that it might be averted; but by the middle of January 1826 all hope had ceased, and he was a ruined man. “Skene, this is the hand of a beggar,” was his salutation in his room in Castle Street, at seven o’clock in the morning of one of those cold January days, as he held out his hand to the confidential friend whom he had asked to call upon him at that early hour that they might consult over the news. All that he had possessed was swept away; and he was liable for debts, as it turned out, to the amount of about £130,000.

It is at this point that one may turn back, if one chooses, to the retrospect of that in Scott’s previous life for which, amid boundless admiration of him otherwise, strict opinion will probably always pronounce him blameworthy. What but his worldly ambition, it is asked, what but his passion for money-making on such a large scale as might enable him to practise lavish social hospitalities, and to found and support a hereditary Scottish lairdship of high rank and name,—what but this had led him to be dissatisfied with his merely literary earnings, and to link the pursuits and pleasures of authorship with the activities and anxieties of a clandestine partnership in hazardous forms of commerce? From one jotting in his Diary it would appear as if, in this matter, even the ruin in which he found himself at last had not taught him real repentance. Quoting a saying of a defunct old Scottish worthy which had been reported to him in these words,—“No chance of opulence is worth the risk of a competence,”—he appends this comment: “It was not the thought of a great man, but perhaps that of a wise one.” Evidently, the ruling passion in Scott had not yet been killed; and, had the hazards of his previous life been still to run, he would have dared them all over again.

More satisfactory it is to leave that retrospective question, and to read the story which the journal tells of his unparalleled exertions to right himself with the world, and with his own sense of honour, to the last farthing of his huge responsibilities. For a while, indeed,—the new shock of his wife’s death having come upon him in the very midst of the first troubles of his ruined condition, and his ability to sustain the load of his distresses being at the same time impaired by serious ill-health and frequent and intense bodily pains,—it is as if the downfall had been complete. Gloom seems to have settled on his spirits; and, though he bears a brave face to the world, we see him, in hours when he was alone, depressed secretly by crowding recollections of his happy past in comparison with the woeful present, and sunk sometimes in mere sobbings and tears. Gradually, however, he rouses himself; and what is it that we see then? Either still at Abbotsford, when his official duties in the Court of Session will allow him to leave town (for, by a family-prearrangement, he had still a life-rent tenure of Abbotsford, and could sequester himself there, when he chose, on a greatly reduced establishment), or else in one or other of those Edinburgh residences to which he removed after his house in Castle Street had been sold,—first, lodgings in North St. David Street, then a furnished house in Walker Street, and finally a house in Shandwick Place,—we see the widowed veteran struggling on in the vast enterprise to which he had set himself of the discharge ultimately of all his debts, dashing cares aside as well as he could, and, though liable still to solitary hours of melancholy and to interrupting worries with lawyers and creditors, yet always pen in hand, and working, working, working. Extend the view over the six years from 1826 to 1831, and what a prolonged labour of Hercules! The voluminous Life of Napoleon Bonaparte; the novel of Woodstock; the double series of “The Chronicles of the Canongate,” including The Two Drovers, The Highland Widow, The Surgeons Daughter, and The Fair Maid of Perth; the separate extra novels of Anne of Geierstein, Count Robert of Paris, and Castle Dangerous; the quadruple series of The Tales of a Grandfather, with a collateral History of Scotland; the Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft; the completion and publication of the verse-dramas called The Doom of Devorgoil and The Ayrshire Tragedy; a collective edition of the Miscellaneous Prose Works; the commencement of the author’s magnum opus, as it was termed, in the shape of the revised and annotated reissue of the whole of the Waverley Novels: these, together with a number of more casual performances, such as the Malachi Malagrowther Letters and contributions to Reviews, formed the astonishing total of Scott’s literary achievements during those six years, in addition to the previous total at which the world had already wondered. What it is most pleasing now to observe in the progress through this dense forest of labour, as it is recorded month after month in the Diary, is the evidence there furnished of Scott’s elasticity of spirits, and of his ready resumption of his old habits of generous sociability, in exact proportion to the success of his exertions. It is as if the immense mass of his debts had stood before him as a huge black rock, and as if, on beholding portion after portion of this rock blasted away by the successive charges of dynamite, large or small, which he was able to insert into its clefts in the shape of successive deposits of new money-earnings,—now, as in the case of his Life of Napoleon, a £10,000 or so at once, and again a more moderate sum of £1000 or £2000 only,—he watched each explosion, and each fall of detached slab or block, with a gleeful “Hurrah! the whole big brute will be down at last!” And, as he thus became himself again, Abbotsford became itself again,—its old hospitalities renewed in as frank and gallant a fashion as was consistent with proper economy in the circumstances, and relays of visitors arriving, and sometimes occupying his working-time too inconsiderately, while at other times it was his happiness to scribble on uninterruptedly, through whole mornings or whole rainy days, with no other recreation than a trudge through his plantations, accompanied by his dogs, and leaning on the arm of his faithful Tom Purdie. In Edinburgh the revival of his old habits in the prospect of his retrieved fortunes was much the same. Though he had not now such accommodation for his own hospitalities there as had been afforded by his former house in Castle Street, Edinburgh society could delight in the full possession of him once more after his temporary seclusion and eclipse. At select dinner-parties, or in other evening gatherings, he was present again hardly less often than had been his previous custom,—the life of every such company still by his overflowing good humour and endless stock of anecdotes and good stories; and, through the day, as he limped along Princes Street, on his way to or from the Parliament House, all heads were turned to look at him,—a greater and more popular Sir Walter than ever, now that it was no longer a mere accepted conjecture that he was the author of the Waverley Novels, but the mask had been thrown aside and the secret had been publicly divulged. He records, by the way, in his Diary, that it was a real addition to his comfort when they presented him with a key of the Princes Street Gardens, then a private property of the Princes Street householders, so that he might walk to or from the Parliament House on soft velvet turf, amid quiet green shrubbery, and thus lessen the trouble caused by his stiffened joints and the increasing pain of his lameness. Nor was it within the circuit of Edinburgh only, or at Abbotsford only, that there was restored sunshine round his path. We hear of occasional excursions to the country seats of Scottish friends of his north of Edinburgh; and twice we follow him on leisurely posting journeys into England, for the purpose of a week or two in London again, and a round of calls and engagements in the busy whirl of London society. Once he crosses the Channel, revisits Paris, and spends some time amid the gaieties of that capital. Hardly from the entries in his Diary relating to those journeys,—so modest always are his mentions of himself,—should we learn what a pressure of admiring curiosity, rising sometimes into tumults of enthusiasm and applause, gathered about him wherever he went. Whosoever else might be present,—ambassador, statesman, peer, scion of royalty, or even (as happened several times) the great Duke of Wellington himself,—it was always to Sir Walter Scott in chief, the contemporary memoirs tell us, that the eyes of the assembly were turned. New veneration for him, by reason of the diffused knowledge of the heroic contest which he had begun and was still maintaining with adverse fortune, mingled now, it seems, with all the former feelings which his name and recollections of his writings called up; and for thousands on thousands, whether at home or abroad, he was the most interesting man in all Europe.

What need to continue this sketch farther? The rest is known, in a general way, to every one. He had reached his sixtieth year,—not absolutely victorious as yet over the whole of the mass of debt against which he had been exerting himself, but with absolute victory within sight if he should live but a few years longer,—when it became evident that no such extension of his life was to be looked for. Signs of premature old age had become manifest in the complete whitening of his hair and the worn aspect of his visage; there had been distinct premonitions of failing powers in the inferior literary quality of some of his later productions; and three paralytic or apoplectic seizures in rapid succession, the last in April 1831, finished the process of wreck. A journey to the Mediterranean was recommended; and thither he went,—conveyed first to London by land, and then, by sea-voyage in a Government frigate, to Malta. From Malta, which he reached late in November 1831, he removed, about the middle of December, to Naples; whence the proposal was that he should pass northwards through the rest of Italy, visiting Rome and other famous Italian cities. All in vain! He grew worse and worse; brain and speech lost their normal functions; his restlessness and impatience became ungovernable. The Mediterranean, Italy, Rome, blue skies and classical cities,—what are they all to me?

They conveyed him back by slow stages, seeing this and that continental sight on his homeward-route, but hardly knowing what he saw. He was in London again for a week or two in June and July 1832, attended medically in a hotel in Jermyn Street. Brought thence by sea to Edinburgh, he passed a night, a day, and another night, in a hotel in St. Andrew Square, in a state of utter unconsciousness; and on the 11th of July they took him to Abbotsford. On their way thither through the old familiar scenery he began to recognise places and objects, and to mutter their names,—Gala Water, Buckholm, Torwoodlee; and, when they approached Abbotsford itself, and he caught sight of its towers, he sprang up in such a state of excitement that they could hardly hold him in the carriage. “Ha! Willie Laidlaw! O man, I have often thought of you,” were his first words, after his old friend and amanuensis Laidlaw, who was waiting in the porch, had assisted the rest in carrying him into the house, and seating him in a chair in the dining-room. The return of consciousness which this recognition signified became more and more marked, at least at intervals, in the two months and ten days through which he still lingered. He talked with those of his family who were about him, could be shifted from room to room or even wheeled in a Bath chair through parts of his grounds, and could listen to readings and seem to take an interest in them. Once he insisted on being placed at his writing-table, with paper, pens, and ink before him in the accustomed order, and wanted to be left to himself; but, when the pen had been put into his hand and his fingers refused to hold it, tears trickled down his cheeks, and he gave up the attempt. There were, as often in such cases of brain-paralysis, some days of almost frantic vehemence, when it was painful to be near him; but these were succeeded by a feeble quietude and a gradual ebbing-away of life. On the 21st of September 1832, with the ripple of the Tweed heard by those who stood round his bed, Sir Walter Scott, then only in the sixty-second year of his age, breathed his last.

In the Diary itself the narrative of those closing years of Scott’s life is broken short at the point where they were bringing him back from Italy as a dying invalid. The last few months are a total blank in the Diary; where, indeed, the entries for the later years of the included seven are scantier and more intermittent than those for the earlier. But it is not solely as an exact autobiographic record of the incidents of so many memorable years of a memorable life that the Diary is now of interest. Implicated in that main interest, and catching the attention of the reader again and again as he advances through the pages, are certain recurring particular informations as to Scott’s character and ways which possess an independent interest, and may be reverted to separately.

Bound up, for example, with the proofs furnished by the Diary of Scott’s prodigious literary industry, there is plenty of minute information as to his habits of composition and his rate of composition. I do not like that word “composition” in any such application, thinking it a miserable word for the description of the process by which a great writer marshals the contents of his mind and commits them to paper; but the word is current, and may serve for the nonce. Well, Scott’s rate of composition was about the fastest known in the history of literature. Of all his predecessors in the literary history of the British Islands, Shakespeare seems to have been the likest to him in this particular of fluent facility and swiftness of production. “His mind and hand went together,” is the well-known report concerning Shakespeare by his literary executors and editors: “his mind and hand went together, and what he thought he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.” One has an impression, however, that Shakespeare, with all his facility when he had the pen in his hand, had it less constantly in his hand, was less “eident” in the use of it (as our good northern phrase goes), than Scott,—whether because he had less actual need to be “eident,” or because verse, which was Shakespeare’s main element, is intrinsically more difficult, takes more out of a man in a given time, and so is less favourable to “eidency,” than the prose element in which, latterly, Scott worked all but exclusively. At all events, “eidency” and “facility” taken together, the result, in the mere matter of quantity, was larger from Scott’s industry than from Shakespeare’s. But it is with the “facility” that we are now concerned, and with the proofs of this “facility” which are furnished by the Journal in particular. The mere look of the handwriting is one of these,—that rapid currente calamo look, without hesitation, and with hardly an erasure, stoppage to point, or any such thing, and with the words almost running into each other in their hurry, which is familiar to all who have seen facsimile reproductions of any portions of the copy of Scott’s novels, when they were written with his own hand, and not dictated. That, however, is a characteristic common to all his writings; and the specific interest of the Diary in this connection is that it gives us definite information as to the amount of writing per day which Scott usually got through in his currente calamo style. In entry after entry there is note of the number of pages he had prescribed to himself as a sufficient day’s “task” or “darg,” with growls when for any reason he had fallen short of it, and smiles of satisfaction when he had exceeded it; and from one entry we ascertain that his maximum per day when he was in good vein was eight pages of his own close manuscript, making forty pages of the usual type in which his copy was set up by the printers. One can compute the difference between that rate and any other rate of which one may happen to have knowledge or experience; but there is no need to conclude that Scott’s rate is to be passionately desired or universally aimed at, or that, because it suited Scott, it would suit others. On the contrary, one sees some disadvantages, even in Scott’s own case, counterbalancing the advantages of such extreme rapidity. He was aware of the fact himself; and he once quotes, with some approbation, an admirable maxim of Chaucer on the subject:—

That Scott was an exception,—that he was, like Shakespeare, one of those workmen who could work both well and hastily,—was owing doubtless to the fact that, in this also resembling Shakespeare, he brought always to the act of writing a mind already full of matter, and of the very kinds of matter required for his occasions. One has but to recollect the extraordinary range and variety of his readings from his earliest youth, the extraordinary range and variety also of his observations of men and manners, and the extraordinary retentiveness of his memory, to see that never since he had begun authorship could he have had to spin, as so many have to do, the threads of his ideas or imaginations out of a vacuum. At the same time, and this notwithstanding, there is something more to be said, when the comparison is between Scott as an exceptionally rapid worker and Shakespeare as the same. Scott had a standard of the kind of matter that would answer for the purposes of his literary productions; and, though a very good standard, it was lower than Shakespeare’s standard for his writings. When Shakespeare was in the act of writing, or was meditating his themes by himself in the solitude of his chamber, or in his walks over the fields, before he proceeded to the act of writing, we see his mind rolling within itself, like a great sea-wash that would rush through all the deeps and caverns, and search through all the intricacies, of its prior structure and acquisitions,—so ruled and commissioned, however, that what the reflux should fetch back for use should not be any wreckage whatsoever that might be commonly relevant and interesting, but only things of gleaming worth and rarity, presentable indeed to all, but appreciable in full only by kings and sages. Hear, on the other hand, in Scott’s own words, the definition of what satisfied him in his dealings with the public. “I am sensible,” he wrote, “that, if there be anything good about my poetry, or prose either, it is a hurried frankness of composition which pleases soldiers, sailors, and young people of bold and active disposition.” That Scott was grossly unfair to himself in this under-estimate will be the verdict now of universal opinion; and I shall have to touch again upon that point presently. Meanwhile there is one other difference to be noted between the two men in respect of that very circumstance of their marked similarity in one characteristic which has led us to view them together. Shakespeare’s boundless ease and fluency in writing did not prevent perfection in his literary execution. His grammar, with all its impetuosity and lightness of spring, is logical and accurate to the utmost demands of the most fastidious English scholarship; and, though he would have repudiated with scorn the name “stylist,” invented of late as a title of literary honour by some of our critics, and it would be profane to think of him under that execrable and disastrous appellation, he wrote always with the sure cunning of a disciplined artist in verbal expression,—an artist so highly self-disciplined that his art in such matters had become an instinct. Scott’s habitual style, on the other hand,—his style when he is not strongly moved either by vehement feeling or by high poetic conception,—is a kind of homely and comfortable slipshod, neglectful of any rule of extreme accuracy, and careless even of the most obvious grammatical solecisms. It is not exactly with reference to this difference between himself and Shakespeare that there occurs in one passage in his Diary a protest against being compared with Shakespeare at all. But the protest is worth quoting. “Like Shakespeare!” he exclaims, noticing the already formed habit of this perilous comparison among his most ardent admirers in his own lifetime,—“like Shakespeare! Not fit to tie his brogues!” It was the superlative of compliment on Scott’s side; but its very wording may be construed into a certain significance in connection with that point of dissimilarity between the two men to which I have just adverted. Shakespeare never wore “brogues.” In our present metaphorical sense, I mean; in the literal sense, I would not be sure but he may have found such articles convenient quite as often as Scott did. There were muddy roads about Stratford-on-Avon as well as about Abbotsford.

It would be wrong not to mention, however briefly, the confirmation furnished by the Journal of all our previous impressions of Scott’s high excellence among his fellow-men, not only in the general virtues of integrity, honour, courage, and persevering industry, but also in all those virtues which constitute what we call in a more particular sense goodness. “Great and good” is one of our common alliterative phrases; and it is a phrase which we seem to require when we would characterise the kind of human being that is entitled to supreme admiration. We feel that either adjective by itself would be inadequate in such a case, but that the doubling suffices. Another of our alliterative phrases, nearly the same in meaning at root, is “head and heart.” Only when there is a conjunction in a human being of what we call “heart” with what we call “intellect” are we quite satisfied even in cases of ordinary experience; and only when there is the conjunction of “great heart” with “great intellect” do we bow down with absolute veneration before this man or that man of historical celebrity. Common and simple though this word “heart” is, there is a world of unused applicability in it yet in many directions. In the criticism of literature, for example, it supplies a test that would make havoc with some high reputations. There have been, and are, writers of the most indubitable ability, and of every variety of ability, in whose writings, if you search them through and through, though you may find instruction in abundance, novelties of thought in abundance, and amusement in abundance, you will find very little of real “heart.” There is no such disappointment when you turn to Scott. Benevolence, charitableness, tolerance, sympathy with those about him in their joys and their sorrows, kindly readiness to serve others when he could, utter absence of envy or real ill-will,—these are qualities that shine out everywhere in his life and in the succession of his writings, and that receive, though they hardly need, additional and more intimate illustration in his Journal. Positively, when I contemplate this richness of heart in Scott, and remember also how free he was all through his life from those moral weaknesses which sometimes accompany and disfigure an unusually rich endowment in this species of excellence,—for, born though he was in an old Scottish age of roughish habits and not over-squeamish speech, and carrying though he did the strong Scottish build of that age, and somewhat of its unabashed joviality, to the very last, his life was exemplary throughout in most particulars of personal conduct,—positively, I say, with all this in my mind, I can express my feeling about Scott no otherwise than by declaring him to have been one of the very best men that ever breathed.

Of the interest of the miscellaneous contents of the book, as including individual incidents in Scott’s life, sketches of the physiognomies and characters of his Edinburgh contemporaries and London contemporaries, descriptions of scenes and places, curious Scottish and other anecdotes, literary criticisms, and expressions of Scott’s opinions on public questions and on men and things in general, no adequate idea can be formed except from itself. As to Scott’s opinions on all the various questions, public or private, on which he had occasion to make up his mind and express what he felt, we may venture on one general remark. They are shrewd opinions, and often or generally just,—the judgments of a man of strong natural sagacity, and mature business-experience, adhering in the main to use and wont, but ready for an independent consideration of exigencies as they arose, and for any clear and safe improvement. Even in politics, though his partisanship in that department was obdurate, avowed, unflinching, and sometimes uproarious, his shrewdness in the forecast of what was possible, or his private determination in favour of what he thought just and desirable, led him sometimes,—especially where Scottish nationality was concerned, and the Thistle seemed to be insulted,—into dissent from his party, and the proclamation of opinions peculiarly his own. It is when we leave the plain ground of such practical and everyday questions, and either ascend to those higher levels, or descend to those deeper, at which the human intellect finds its powers more hardly tasked,—it is then that we observe what is usually reckoned a defect in Scott in comparison with many who have been far inferior to him in other intellectual respects. There was little in his mind of what may be called the purely noetic organ, that faculty which speculates, investigates, deals with difficult problems of science or philosophy, and seeks in every subject for ultimate principles and a resting-ground of final conclusions. He either refrained from such exercises of mind entirely, or was content with proximate and easily accessible axioms. Even in literary criticism, where he might be supposed to have been most at home, it is sagacious extempore judgments that he offers, honest expressions of his own immediate likings or dislikings, rather than suggestions or deductions from any code of reasoned principles. So in matters of higher and more solemn concern. From that simpler kind of philosophy which has been defined as a constant Meditation of Death Scott did not refrain, because no good or serious man can. There is evidence in his Journal that in his solitary hours he allowed himself often enough to lapse into this profoundest of meditations, and rolled through his mind the whole burthen of its everlasting mysteries. But the inscrutable for Scott, in this subject as in others, began at a short distance from his first cogitations or his inherited creed. “I would, if called upon, die a martyr for the Christian Religion,” he writes once in his Diary; and no one can doubt that the words were written with the most earnest sincerity. But, when we interpret them duly by the light of other passages, and of all that we know independently, it is as if we saw Scott standing upright with flushed face and clenched hands, and saying to those about him who might want to trouble him too much on so sacred a subject,—“This is the faith that has been transmitted to us from far-back generations; this is the faith in which millions of abler men than I am, or than you are, have lived and died; I hold by that faith, without seeking too curiously to define it or to discuss its several tenets; and, if you come too near me, to pester me with your doubts and questionings, and new inquiries and speculations, and all the rest of your clever nineteenth-century metaphysics, I warn you that the soul of all my fathers will rise in me, and I shall become dangerous.” In plainer words, on this subject, as on others, it was in Scott’s constitution to rest in that kind of wisdom which declines thinking beyond a certain distance.

Here, again, and in a new connection, we come round to Shakespeare. In him, no one needs to be reminded, the noetic faculty existed in dimensions absolutely enormous, working wonderfully in conjunction with his equally enormous faculty of imagination, and yet with the incessant alertness, the universal aggressiveness, and the self-enjoying mobility, of a separate mental organ. Hence those glances from heaven to earth and to the underworld which earth conceals, those shafts of reasoned insight into the roots of all things, those lightning gleams of speculation to its last extreme, that wealth of maxims of worldly prudence outrivalling and double-distilling the essence of all that is in Bacon’s Essays, those hints and reaches towards an ultimate philosophy both of nature and of human life, which have made Shakespeare’s writings till now, and will make them henceforth, a perennial amazement. Well, after what has just been said of Scott, are we bound, on this account, to give up the customary juxtaposition of the two men? Hardly so, I think; for there is a consideration of some importance yet in reserve. I will introduce it by a little anecdote taken from the Journal itself.

People are still alive who have had personal acquaintance with Miss Stirling Graham,—the lady who died as recently as 1877 at the venerable age of ninety-five years, and who, some fifty or sixty years before that, was famous in Edinburgh society for what were called her mystifications. These consisted in her power of assuming an imaginary character (generally that of an old Scottish lady), dressing up in that character, appearing so dressed up unexpectedly in any large company in a drawing-room, or even in the private study of some eminent lawyer or judge, and carrying on a long rigmarole conversation in the assumed character with such bewildering effect that her auditor or auditors were completely deceived, and supposed the garrulous intruder to be some crazy eccentric from a country-house or some escaped madwoman. It was on the 7th of March 1828 that Sir Walter Scott witnessed, in the house of Lord Gillies, after dinner, one of those “mystifications” of Miss Stirling Graham; and he describes it in his Journal thus:—“Miss Stirling Græme, a lady of the Duntroon family, from whom Clavers was descended, looks like thirty years old, and has a face of the Scottish cast, with a good expression in point of good sense and good-humour. Her conversation, so far as I have had the advantage of hearing it, is shrewd and sensible, but noways brilliant. She dined with us, went off as if to the play, and returned in the character of an old Scottish lady. Her dress and behaviour were admirable, and her conversation unique. I was in the secret, of course, and did my best to keep up the ball; but she cut me out of all feather. The prosing account which she gave of her son, the antiquary, who found an auld wig in a slate-quarry, was extremely ludicrous; and she puzzled the Professor of Agriculture with a merciless account of the succession of crops in the parks around her old mansion-house. No person to whom the secret was not entrusted had the least guess of an imposture, except one shrewd young lady present, who observed the hand narrowly, and saw that it was plumper than the age of the lady seemed to warrant.” From a note appended to this entry by Mr. Douglas we learn what Sir Walter said to Miss Stirling Graham on this occasion, by way of complimenting her on her performance after it was over. “Awa’, awa’!” he said; “the Deil’s ower grit wi’ you.” There was, he saw, something supernatural in her when she was in the mood and attitude of her one most congenial function. All the gifts that were latent in the shrewd and sensible-looking, but noways brilliant lady, flashed out upon others, and were revealed even to herself, in the act of her personations.

With the lesson in our minds which this little story supplies, we may return to the matter of Scott’s reputed deficiency in the speculative or purely noetic faculty:—Noetic faculty! Noetic fiddlestick! This faculty, with a score of others perhaps for which our meagre science of mind has no names, you will find in Scott too, if you know how to look for them. When and where would you have looked for the noetic faculty in Nelson? Not, certainly, as he was to be seen in common life, a little man of slouching gait, with his empty right arm-sleeve pinned to his breast, and gravely propounding as an unanswerable argument in his own experience for the immateriality of the soul the fact that, though there was now an interval of half a yard from the stump of his lost arm and the place where his fingers had been, he could still sometimes feel twitches of rheumatism in those merely spectral finger-tips. No! but see him on his own great wooden three-decker, as he was taking her into action between the enemy’s lines, when the battle-roar and the battle-flashes had brought the electric shiver through his veins, and he stood among his sailors transmuted into the real Nelson, seamanship incarnate and a fighting demigod! So, with the necessary difference for the purpose now in view, in the case of Scott. His various faculties of intellect were involved inextricably somehow in that imaginative faculty which he did possess, and also in enormous degree, in common with Shakespeare. When Scott was engaged on any of his greater works,—a Lay of the Last Minstrel, a Marmion, a Lady of the Lake, a Waverley, a Guy Mannering, an Antiquary, an Old Mortality, a Heart of Midlothian, an Ivanhoe, or a Redgauntlet,—when he was so engaged, and when the poetic phrenzy had seized him strongly,—then what happened? Why, then that imaginative faculty which seemed to be the whole of him, or the best of him, revealed itself somehow as not a single faculty, but a complex composition of various faculties, some of them usually dormant. This it did by visibly splitting itself, resolving itself, into the multiplicity of which it was composed; and then the plain everyday man of the tall upright head, sagacious face, and shaggy eyebrows, was transmuted, even to his own surprise, into a wizard that could range and speculate,—range and speculate incalculably. It was, I say, as if then there were loosened within him, out of his one supposed faculty of phantasy, a simultaneous leash of other faculties, a noetic faculty included, that could spring to incredible distances from his ordinary self, each pursuing its appropriate prey, finding it, seizing it, sporting with it, and coiling it back obediently to the master’s feet. In some such way, I think, must be explained the splendour of the actual achievements of Scott’s genius, the moderate dimensions of his purely reasoning energy in all ordinary circumstances notwithstanding. His reasoning energy was locked up organically, let us say, in his marvellous imagination. And so, remembering all that Scott has left us,—those imperishable tales and romances which no subsequent successes in the British literature of fiction have superseded, and by the glamour of which his own little land of brown heath and shaggy wood, formerly of small account in the world, has become a dream and fascination for all the leisurely of all the nations,—need we cease, after all, from thinking of him in juxtaposition, due interval allowed, with England’s greatest man, the whole world’s greatest man, of the literary order, or abandon the habit of speaking of Sir Walter Scott as our Scottish Shakespeare?