for truth of character and sentiment. Here most obviously, with all their differences, Balzac and Scott are agreed: expensive both of them in description, but neither of them inclined to let mere description (in Pope's phrase) take the place of sense—i.e. of the life which it is the business of the novelist to interpret. There is danger, no doubt, of overdoing it, but description in Balzac, however full and long, is never inanimate. He has explained his theory in a notice of Scott, or rather in a comparison of Scott and Fenimore Cooper (Revue Parisienne, 1840), where the emptiness of Cooper's novels is compared with the variety of Scott's, the solitude of the American lakes and forests with the crowd of life commanded by the author of Waverley. Allowing Cooper one great success in the character of Leather-stocking and some merit in a few other personages, Balzac finds beyond these nothing like Scott's multitude of characters; their place is taken by the beauties of nature. But description cannot make up for want of life in a story.

Balzac shows clearly that he understood the danger of description, and how impossible, how unreasonable, it is to make scenery do instead of story and characters. He does not seem to think that Scott has failed in this respect, while in his remarks on Scott's humour he proves how far he is from the critics who found in Scott nothing but scenery and accoutrements and the rubbish of old chronicles. Scott's chivalry and romance are not what Balzac is thinking about. Balzac is considering Scott's imagination in general, his faculty in narrative and dialogue, wherever his scene may be, from whatever period the facts of his story may be drawn.

Scott's superiority to his American rival comes out, says Balzac, chiefly in his secondary personages and in his talent for comedy. The American makes careful mechanical provision for laughter: Balzac takes this all to pieces, and leaves Scott unchallenged and inexhaustible.

Scott's reputation has suffered a little through suspicion of his politics, and, strangely enough, of his religion. He has been made responsible for movements in Churches about which opinions naturally differ, but of which it is certain Scott never dreamed. Those who suspect and blame his work because it is reactionary, illiberal, and offensive to modern ideas of progress, are, of course, mainly such persons as believe in 'the march of intellect,' and think meanly of each successive stage as soon as it is left behind. The spokesman of this party is Mark Twain, who wrote a burlesque of the Holy Grail, and who in his Life on the Mississippi makes Scott responsible for the vanities and superstitions of the Southern States of America:—

It is useless to moralise on this, and the purport and significance of it may be left for private meditation to enucleate and enjoy. But it cannot be fully appreciated, unless one remembers that the author of this and other charges against chivalry is also the historian of the feud between the Shepherdsons and the Grangerfords, equal in tragedy to the themes of the chansons de geste: of Raoul de Cambrai or Garin le Loherain. Mark Twain in the person of Huckleberry Finn is committed to the ideas of chivalry neither more nor less than Walter Scott in Ivanhoe or The Talisman. I am told further—though this is perhaps unimportant—that Gothic ornament in America is not peculiarly the taste of the South, that even at Chicago there are