good quality has some direct, or indirect tendency to produce another. It were an unphilosophical creation, that of a human being—
"Linked with one virtue, and a thousand crimes."
That virtue would have been a sweet lure to better companions. Schiller is nearer truth when he says—
"Never, believe me, appear the immortals—
Never alone."
Scott has a peculiar faculty of awakening this love of the country, and of idealising it into a love of the picturesque. Who can wonder then, that when such descriptions came accompanied with all the associations of romance—all the interest of stirring narrative—that a visit to "Caledonia, stern and wild," became the day-dream of all who looked to their summer excursion as the delight and reward of the year. I have never visited Scotland—in all human probability I never shall; but were a fairy, that pleasant remover of all ordinary difficulties, to give me the choice of what country I wished to see, my answer would be—Scotland; and that solely to realise the pictures, which reading Scott has made part of my memory.
Another noticeable fact is, the number of books which have grown out of the Waverley novels. How many local and antiquarian tomes have brought forth a world of curious and attractive information, in which no one before took an interest! And here I may be allowed to allude to the prejudice, for such it is, that the historical novel is likely to be taken for, and to interfere with history. Not such novels as Scott wrote, certainly. In the first place, his picture of the time is as exact as it is striking: the reader must inevitably add to his stock of knowledge, as well as of amusement: he must acquire a general notion of the time; its good and its evil are brought in a popular shape before him; while the estimate of individual character is as true as it is forcible. Secondly, there must be something inherently vacant and unproductive in the mind which his pages stimulate to no further inquiry.
In such hands it would be of little consequence whether a fictitious or an actual chronicle were placed—either would lead to no result. Scott's works have done more towards awakening a rational curiosity, than a whole world of catechisms and abridgements would ever have accomplished. History has been read owing to his stimulus.
Prose fiction was at its lowest ebb when Waverley appeared. Scott gives in his preface a most amusing picture of the supply then in the market: a castle was no castle without a ghost, or at least what seemed one till the last chapter, and the heroine was a less actual creation than the harp which ever accompanied her. These heroines were always faultless: the heroes were divided into two classes; either as perfect as their impossible mistresses, or else rakes who were reformed in the desperate extremity of a third volume. Waverley must have taken the populace of novel readers quite by surprise: there is in its pages the germ of every excellence, afterwards so fully developed—the description, like a painting; the skill in giving the quaint and peculiar in character; the dramatic narrative; and above all, that tone of romance before unknown to English prose literature. Flora M'lvor is the first conception of female character in which the highly imaginative is the element.
Perhaps we must except the Clementina of Richardson—a poetical
