imitations of Gothic towers and halls.

Hazlitt, an unbeliever in most of Scott's political principles, is also the most fervent and expressive admirer of the novels, quite beyond the danger of modern progress, his judgment not corrupted at all by the incense of the cotton-factory or the charm of the locomotive. Hazlitt's praise of Scott is an immortal proof of Hazlitt's sincerity in criticism. Scott's friends were not Hazlitt's, and Scott and Hazlitt differed both in personal and public affairs as much as any men of their time. But Hazlitt has too much sense not to be taken with the Scotch novels, and too much honesty not to say so, and too much spirit not to put all his strength into praising, when once he begins. Hazlitt's critical theory of Scott's novels is curiously like his opinion about Scott's old friend, the poet Crabbe: whose name I cannot leave without a salute to the laborious and eloquent work of M. Huchon, his scholarly French interpreter.

Hazlitt on Crabbe and Scott is a very interesting witness on account of the principles and presuppositions employed by him. In the last hundred years or so the problems of realism and naturalism have been canvassed almost too thoroughly between disputants who seem not always to know when they are wandering from the point or wearying their audience with verbiage and platitudes. But out of all the controversy there has emerged at least one plain probability—that there is no such thing as simple transference of external reality into artistic form. This is what Hazlitt seems to ignore very strangely in his judgment of Crabbe and Scott, and this is, I think, an interesting point in the history of criticism, especially when it is remembered that Hazlitt was a critic of painting, and himself a painter. He speaks almost as if realities passed direct into the verse of Crabbe; as if Scott's imagination in the novels were merely recollection and transcription of experience. Speaking of the difference between the genius of Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott, he says:

I may not at this time quote much more of Hazlitt's criticism, but the point of it would be misunderstood if it were construed as depreciation of Scott. What may be considered merely memory in contrast to Shakespeare's imagination is regarded by Hazlitt as a limitless source of visionary life when compared with the ideas of self-centred authors like Byron. This is what Hazlitt says in another essay of the same series:—