FEMALE PORTRAIT GALLERY, FROM SIR WALTER SCOTT.
BY THE AUTHOR OF "THE IMPROVVISATRICE."
No. III.—Alice Lee.
From Marmion to Woodstock is a wide step—it passes over the greater portion of Sir Walter's life—they belong indeed to periods as widely different as they are widely apart. Marmion belongs to the spring, Woodstock to the autumn. The one is fresh, eager, and impetuous, there are the winds of March, and the flowers of April; it abounds with that prodigality of power and beauty which belongs to the year's first and lavish season. The other has the same power and the same beauty—but the exercise of the one is skilful, and the display of the other mellowed. But it is in the writer's self that the chief change is found—many a hue has faded from the landscape—many a green leaf turned yellow since the exquisite introductions ushered in the various cantos. Many a pulse, too, has lost its elasticity—many a warm quick emotion sleeps to awaken no more: the heart loses its youth while the mind is in all its vigour. In one of the memoranda of the deeply-affecting journal in the last volume of "Scott's Life," he observes:—"People say that the whole human frame in all its parts and divisions, is gradually, in the act, decaying and renewing. What a curious timepiece it would be that could indicate to us the moment this gradual and insensible change had so completely taken place that no atom was left of the original person who had existed at a certain period, but there existed in his stead another person having the same thews and sinews, the same face and lineaments, the same consciousness—a new ship built on an old plank—a pair of transmigrated stockings like those of Sir John Cutler, all green without one thread of the original black left! singular, to be at once another and the same."
