But what Scott did see, in the year of Castlereagh's death, was that

'of the three kingdoms the English alone are qualified to mix in politics safely and without fatal results; the fierce and hasty resentments of the Irish, and the sullen, long-enduring, revengeful temper of my countrymen make such agitations have a much wider and more dreadful effect among them.'*

And in 1826, he wrote to Croker the terrible and true prophecy, which may well be compared with Grattan's prophecy of the probable results of the Union of 1801:

'Scotland completely liberalised, as she is in a fair way of being, will be the most dangerous neighbour to England that she has had since 1639. There is yet time to make a stand, for there is yet a great deal of good and genuine feeling left in the country. But if you unscotch us you will find us damned mischievous Englishmen. The restless, and yet laborious and constantly watchful character of the people, their desire for speculation in politics or anything else, only restrained by some proud feeling about their own country, now become antiquated and which late measures will tend much to destroy, will make them, under a wrong direction, the most formidable revolutionists who ever took the field of innovation.'

Well might the Whig Cockburn say that Scott's sense was still more wonderful than his genius.† Burns, indeed, in 'The Author's Earnest Cry and Prayer' (1786) had, on a much smaller provocation, a similar opinion of what would happen if Scotland were 'unscotched.'

'An' Lord! if ance they pit her till 't,
Her tartan petticoat she'll kilt

An' durk an' pistol at her belt,
She'll tak the streets,

An' rin her whittle to the hilt
I' the first she meets!'

This lack of political restraint and judgment was never more glaringly displayed than during Mr Gladstone's famous 'Midlothian campaign' of 1880. The late Sir Thomas Raleigh once told the writer that, at one of the Edinburgh elections late in the last century, the most popular election speech he heard was from a man

* Lockhart, chap. lvi, p. 477.

† Ibid, chap, xli, p. 370.

who climbed up a lamp-post, waved his hat, and roared out, 'To Hell wi' th' auld Kirk.' Sir Walter could, indeed, foresee many of the dangers ahead from the temper of his countrymen, but they were dangers mainly to be feared from their too great virility; he was spared the fear of seeing their decline in proud family independence and thrift. Any one who has had to do in the most recent times with Scottish Universities must be aware of the disastrous results of the bequest of the egregious Mr Carnegie for the payment of University fees to poor students. It used to be the pride of a peasant or artisan family to save and scrape the last bawbee in order to educate the ablest of its sons; now there is no such need, and all children alike of both sexes are sent to flood the Universities and to incur all the dangers of city life, whether or no they have character to withstand these, or incentive to profit by the experience. Nothing, in our judgment, has done so much to sap the character of the most virile race on earth.

We have to thank Mr Stalker very heartily for some admirable scenes, some admirable vignettes of the people connected with Sir Walter, although a captious critic might fairly point to the inconsistency of saying that Scott found John Ballantyne's originality 'an oasis in the desert of social life,' whereas most of the book is occupied in showing Scott's social life as the very antithesis of a 'desert. But he has the eye of the true artist for seizing simple and picturesque details, e.g. in chaps. x and xii, and he approaches with discretion and fairness the vexed question of the personality of Lady Scott. Her sharp French wit, her laziness (the laziness, indeed, of the whole family in respect of letter-writing or even in answering Sir Walter's own lovely and loving letters to them), her lack of sympathy with her husband's misfortunes, yet her own stoicism in bearing the illness of which she was then dying, are excellently shown. Yet when he accuses Sir Walter of mercenary and snobbish views in regard to his first love, Williamina, and of complete indifference to her after she had refused him, he forgets that his subject was a very fine gentleman, and had to repress his feelings. That these were lasting and only severely kept under, both the portrait of 'Greenmantle' in 'Redgauntlet,' and the tragic story

of his interviews with Lady Jane Stuart (Williamina's aged mother) in 1827, sufficiently prove. Scott was not a man to wear his heart on his sleeve. When Mr Stalker goes on to laugh at him for not knowing how to woo, he becomes merely vulgar. Nothing indeed seems to us finer in Scott's life than his tenderness ¡towards 'Mamma,' though it looks very much as if she were hardly a help-meet for him. There is an excellent analysis of their situation in a letter of the late Prof. Dicey's to W. P. Ker (March 11, 1919), which his biographer, Prof. Rait, allows me to quote here:

'I remember thinking Matilda and her lover (in "Rokeby ") equally uninteresting characters. If, as some people seem to intimate, their relation in any way represents Scott's failure as a lover, I should conclude what I have always suspected, that the lady he fell in love with must have been about as poor a judge of greatness or real attractiveness as I think Matilda certainly was. It is really hard to conceive that the woman whom Scott was passionately fond of should have been such a fool as to reject his love. I cannot help wishing that Scott's marriage had never taken place. It seems to me that, from beginning to end of life, you see that Lady Scott was a person far inferior to the wife he ought to have found. I cannot but suspect that he violated a sharp piece of advice set down somewhere by Archbishop Whately. . . . The counsel is, in effect, "no man who has been rejected by one lady (A) should make a proposal to any other lady (B) in less than one full year after the rejection. If he does make the second proposal sooner, he will certainly propose to B either because he thinks her like A, or because he thinks her unlike A; and neither of these is a good reason for proposing to marry B.",

A careless, pleasure-loving Frenchwoman whom Scott had known for a week was suddenly substituted for an ideal. The ideal may have been (as Mr Stalker somewhat rashly judges from her portrait) 'a very calculating lady indeed,' though we have absolutely no means of estimating this: she might have failed him as badly as, or worse than, Charlotte perhaps failed him (it is only guess-work to say that Charlotte did). But if she had proved to be, or if Scott had wedded, a woman of truly 'Journal,' Oct. 25, Nov.

L. J. S.' Lockhart also omits 6, 7, 10, 1827, The name is there written the name (chap. lxxiv, p. 673). The friendly 'but sad intercourse continued till Lady Jane's death in 1829.

RGIA

noble and lofty character, her influence might have been exerted to restrain him from his three great mistakes. Whether even the noblest could have had any active force to stimulate his genius, to urge it continually along its own natural paths, is far more doubtful. The experience of human nature is against such a probability; the stranger, even the dearest wife, intermeddleth not with the joy of the dreamer of fairy dreams. Nay, it is quite possible that a great master of Romance may be driven inwards to his own brightest visions just because those with whom he lives most intimately during his waking life are, however sweet and kindly, quite out of touch with Fairyland. There is yet another possibility: Scott may have 'set his lance above mischance,' careless whether he hit or missed, because his Lady was not there.'

In conclusion, in all the wide range of the might-havebeens, how can we fail to regret three things in Sir Walter's career? The poorness of his own later poems might have been forgiven, or, at worst, it might have but slightly overballasted the ship. But the mass of absurd literary projects which he fathered, out of sheer good-nature, out of sheer closing of his eyes, and deliberate blinding of his own excellent literary judgment, and with which he positively sank the crazy bark of the Ballantynes, simply because he could not say no to some incredible ass like Weber, some ridiculous blue stocking like Anna Seward-this must constitute the first count against him; and by it he unconsciously wronged the Ballantynes almost as much as they wronged him. The second count is the land-hunger which began with the fatal move from Ashestiel to Abbotsford, and went on to involve all the tangled financial distresses to which he kept his eyes equally shut till it was too late. Mr Stalker claims, at the beginning of his book, that 'it is the first time any one has taken the trouble to master the details of Scott's involved connexion with the business firms and their failure,' and he devotes, indeed, two chapters to the subject-with the result, so far as the present writer is concerned, that he leaves it more unintelligible than ever. The third mistake was the most serious of all and, though it arose partly from Scott's own indifference to literary fame, it was far more due to the deliberately interested counsels of his evil geniuses

themselves, again the Ballantynes. It was the leaving of the Scottish scenes and Scottish characters, in which he was perfectly at home, for tales of other lands and other times, which, indeed, he illuminated, by sheer force of genius and splendour of imagination, as no one had done before him, and as no one, unless it be Thackeray in Esmond,' has done since-all because, as Andrew Lang says, the Ballantynes 'raired for chivalry.' Would that our hero could have had the subtlety to answer their demands as Jane Austen answered the Reverend J. S. Clarke, librarian to the Prince Regent, when in 1816 he suggested that she should try her hand on any historical romance illustrative of the history of the august House of Cobourg': 'I could not sit down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself and other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No, I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way.'* With all respect to the judgment of Thackeray himself, we prefer that of Lockhart, even on 'Ivanhoe': 'But I believe that no reader who is capable of thoroughly comprehending the author's Scottish characters and Scottish dialogue will ever place "Ivanhoe" as a work of genius on the same level with "Waverley," "Guy Mannering," or "The Heart of Midlothian."'† We go further and say that every step on to the English, or the continental stage, yes, even 'Nigel,' even 'Quentin Durward' and 'Woodstock,' were steps downwards towards Count Robert.' It was not that Scott's eye was dim, nor his natural force abated after the serious illness of 1819, else how could 'The Pirate, or St Ronan's Well,' above all, how could the imperishable splendours of 'Redgauntlet,' have been produced, how in the last agonising period, 'The Highland Widow'? It was rather that he was drawn aside, partly no doubt by the unfortunate need for gold, more because, by misleading counsel, he was induced to underestimate the appetite of his public for that which he knew, and his best critics knew, to be his best; but most of all because he felt that he could set no limits to his own rich powers of imagination. C. R. L. FLETCHER.

Life and Letters, 323-4.

† Lockhart, chap. lxvi, p. 419.