preferred. The novels were 'the Scotch novels.' Although Thackeray, when he praises Scott, takes most of his examples from the less characteristic, what we may call the English group, on the other hand, Hazlitt dwells most willingly on the Scotch novels, though he did not like Scotsmen, and shared some of the prejudice of Stendhal—'my friend Mr. Beyle,' as he calls him in one place—with regard to Scott himself. And Balzac has no invidious preferences: he recommends an English romance, Kenilworth, to his sister, and he also remembers David Deans, a person most intensely and peculiarly Scots.

One may distinguish the Scotch novels, which only their author could have written, from novels like Peveril of the Peak or Anne of Geierstein, which may be thought to resemble rather too closely the imitations of Scott, the ordinary historical novel as it was written by Scott's successors. But though the formula of the conventional historical novel may have been drawn from the less idiomatic group, it was not this that chiefly made Scott's reputation. His fame and influence were achieved through the whole mass of his immense and varied work; and the Scots dialect and humours, which make so large a part of his resources when he is putting out all his power, though they have their difficulties for readers outside of Scotland, were no real hindrances in the way of the Scotch novels: Dandie Dinmont and Bailie Nicol Jarvie, Cuddie Headrigg and Andrew Fairservice were not ignored or forgotten, even where Ivanhoe or The Talisman might have the preference as being more conformable to the general mind of novel readers.

The paradox remains: that the most successful novelist of the whole world should have had his home and found his strength in a country with a language of its own, barely intelligible, frequently repulsive to its nearest neighbours, a language none the more likely to win favour when the manners or ideas of the country were taken into consideration as well.

The critics who refuse to see much good in Scott, for the most part ignore the foundations of his work. Thus Stendhal, who acknowledges Scott's position as representative of his age, the one really great, universally popular, author of his day, does not recognise in Scott's imagination much more than trappings and tournaments, the furniture of the regular historical novel. He compares Scott's novels with La Princesse de Clèves, and asks which is more to be praised, the author who understands and reveals the human heart, or the descriptive historian who can fill pages with unessential details but is afraid of the passions.

In which it seems to be assumed that Scott, when he gave his attention to the background and the appropriate dresses, was neglecting the dramatic truth of his characters and their expression. Scott, it may be observed, had, in his own reflexions on the art of novel-writing, taken notice of different kinds of policy in dealing with the historical setting. In his lives of the novelists, reviewing The Old English Baron, he describes the earlier type of historical novel in which little or nothing is done for antiquarian decoration or for local colour; while in his criticism of Mrs. Radcliffe he uses the very term—'melodrama'—and the very distinction—melodrama as opposed to tragedy—which is the touchstone of the novelist. Whatever his success might be, there can be no doubt as to his intentions. He meant his novels, with their richer background and their larger measure of detail, to sacrifice nothing of dramatic truth. La Princesse de Clèves, a professedly historical novel with little 'local colour', may be in essentials finer and more sincere than Scott. This is a question which I ask leave to pass over. But it is not Scott's intention to put off the reader with details and decoration as a substitute