what it was three hundred years ago to what it is no what it is now to all that the bigoted admirer of the good most dreads and hates!

It is long since we read, and long since we thought of ou thor's poetry. It would probably have gone out of date w immediate occasion, even if he himself had not contrived w it from our recollection. It is not to be denied that it had merit, both of an obvious and intrinsic kind. It abounded m descriptions, in spirited action, in smooth and flowing versi But it wanted character. It was " poetry of no mark or like. Som It slid out of the mind as soon as read, like a river; and have been forgotten, but that the public curiosity was led wa ever new supplies from the same teeming liquid scurce. It as every man that can write six quarto volumes in verse, that are caught up with avidity, even by fastidious judges Eat w difference between their popularity and that of the Sruth Nov It is true, the public read and admired the Lay of the Lau strel, Marmion, and so on, and each individual was contrated read and admire because the public did so: but with regard i prose-works of the same (supposed) author, it is quite amar m sort of thing. Here every one stands forward to applaad own ground, would be thought to go before the patie opazam z eager to extol his favourite characters louder, to understand n better than every body else, and has his own scale of comparat ve excellence for each work, supported by nothing but his own en siastic and fearless convictions. It must be amusing to the A of Waverley to hear his readers and admirers (and are not these the same thing?) quarrelling which of his novels is the best, spong character to character, quoting passage against passage, striving to surpass each other in the extravagance of their encomiuma, and yet unable to settle the precedence, or to do the author's writing"

•No For we met with a young lady who kept a circulating Abrary and milliner's shop, in a watering place in the country, who, when we mga the Scotch Noreis, spoke indifferently about them said they were “as could hardly get through them," and recommended us to read 4 never thought of it before, but we would venture to lay a wager that there are many other young ladies in the same situation, and who think “Chi Martao ity"" d "dry."

SIR WALTER SCOTT.

justice-so various, so equal, so transcendant are their merits!
His volumes of poetry were received as fashionable and well-
dressed acquaintances: we are ready to tear the others in pieces
as old friends. There was something meretricious in Sir Walter's
ballad-rhymes; and like those who keep opera figurantes, we
were willing to have our admiration shared, and our taste con-
firmed by the town: but the Novels are like the betrothed of our
hearts, bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh, and we are jealous
that any one should be as much delighted or as thoroughly ac-
quainted with their beauties as ourselves. For which of his poeti-
cal heroines would the reader break a lance so soon as for Jeanie
Deans? What Lady of the Lake can compare with the beautiful
Rebecca? We believe the late Mr. John Scott went to his death-
bed (though a painful and premature one) with some degree of
satisfaction, inasmuch as he had penned the most elaborate pane-
gyric on the Scotch Novels that had as yet appeared!-The Epics
There is a glitter-
are not poems, so much as metrical romances.
ing veil of verse thrown over the features of nature and of old
The deep incisions into character are "skinned and
filmed over "—the details are lost or shaped into flimsy and insipid
decorum; and the truth of feeling and of circumstance is translated
into a tinkling sound, a tinsel common-place. It must be owned,
there is a power in true poetry that lifts the mind from the ground
of reality to a higher sphere, that penetrates the inert, scattered, in-
coherent materials presented to it, and by a force and inspiration
of its own, melts and moulds them into sublimity and beauty.-
But Sir Walter (we contend, under correction) has not this creative
impulse, this plastic power, this capacity of reacting on his first
his
impressions. He is a learned, a literal, a matter-of-fact expounder
of truth or fable:* he does not soar above and look down upon
subject, imparting his own lofty views and feelings to his descrip-
tions of nature he relies upon it, is raised by it, is one with it, or
he is nothing. A poet is essentially a maker; that is, he must
atone for what he loses in individuality and local resemblance by the
energies and resources of his own mind. The writer of whom
we speak is deficient in these last. He has either not the faculty

romance.

Just as Cobbett is a matter-of-fact reasoner.

or not the will to impregnate his subject by an effet of pres vention. The execution also is much upon a par with ephemeral effusions of the press. It is light, agreeable, « Fem diffuse. Sir Walter's Muse is a Modern Antique. The glossy texture of his verse contrasts happily with the uncouth, rugged materials of which it is composed; and 267 away any appearance of heaviness or harshness from the boy a local traditions and obsolete costume. We see grim kaqia iron armour; but then they are woven in silk with a care.rm. cate hand, and have the softness of flowers. The poet's £7 might be compared to old tapestries copied on the finest ve.:they are not like Raphael's Cartoons, but they are very... Westall's drawings, which accompany, and are intended to s trate them. This facility and grace of execution is the m markable, as a story goes that not long before the appeara: the Lay of the Last Minstrel Sir Walter (then Mr) Scott, having in the company of a friend, to cross the Frith of Forth in a lev boat, they proposed to beguile the time by writing a number a verses on a given subject, and that at the end of an hours hist study, they found they had produced only six lines between em "It is plain," said the unconscious author to his fellow labang "that you and I need never think of getting our living by wrang poetry" In a year or so after this, he set to work, and pred quarto upon quarto, as if they had been drops of water Arche rest, and compared with true and great poets, our Scottish Monstrei is but "a metre ballad-monger." We would rather have w one song of Burns, or a single passage in Lord Byron's Haven and Earth, or one of Wordsworth's “fancies and gavle-23) than all his epics. What is he to Spenser, over whose immortal, ever-amiable verse beauty hovers and trembles, and who has shed the purple light of Fancy, from his ambrosial wings, over a.. 20 ture? What is there of the might of Milton, whose head a pied in the blue serene, and who takes us to sit with him What is there (in his ambling rhymes) of the deep pati Chaucer? Or of the o'er-informing power of Shakspeare, ww eye, watching alike the minutest traces of characters and strongest movements of passion, "glances from heaven to earh, from earth to heaven," and with the lambent flame of gez a

playing round each object, lights up the universe in a robe of its own radiance? Sir Walter has no voluntary power of combination: all his associations (as we said before) are those of habit or of tradition. He is a mere narrative and descriptive poet, garrulous of the old time. The definition of his poetry is a pleasing superficiality.

Not so of his NOVELS AND ROMANCES. There we turn over a new leaf-another and the same-the same in matter, but in form, in power how different! The author of Waverley has got rid of the tagging of rhymes, the eking out of syllables, the supplying of epithets, the colours of style, the grouping of his characters, and the regular march of events, and comes to the point at once, and strikes at the heart of his subject, without dismay and without disguise. His poetry was a lady's waiting-maid, dressed out in cast-off finery; his prose is a beautiful, rustic nymph, that, like Dorothea in Don Quixote, when she is surprised with dishevelled tresses bathing her naked feet in the brook, looks round her, abashed at the admiration her charms have excited! The grand secret of the author's success in these latter productions is that he has completely got rid of the trammels of authorship; and torn off at one rent (as Lord Peter got rid of so many yards of lace in the Tale of a Tub) all the ornaments of fine writing and worn-out sentimentality. All is fresh, as from the hand of nature: by going a century or two back and laying the scene in a remote and uncultivated district, all becomes new and startling in the present advanced period. Highland manners, characters, scenery, superstitions. Northern dialect and costume, the wars, the religion, and politics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, give a charming and wholesome relief to the fastidious refinement and "over-laboured lassitude" of modern readers, like the effect of plunging a nervous valetudinarian into a cold bath. The Scotch Novels, for this reason, are not so much admired in Scotland as in England. The contrast, the transition is less striking. From the top of the CaltonHill, the inhabitants of "Auld Reekie" can descry or fancy they descry the peaks of Ben Lomond and the waving outline of Rob Roy's country: we who live at the southern extremity of the island can only catch a glimpse of the billowy scene in the descriptions of the author of Waverley. The mountain air is most bracing to

our languid nerves, and it is brought up in ship-loads fr. neighbourhood of Abbot's-Ford. There is another cir. ma to be taken into the account. In Edinburgh there is a Luze sition and something of the spirit of cabal between the part same works proceeding from Mr. Constable's and Mr. Bacas shops. Mr Constable gives the highest prices; but be Whig bookseller, it is grudged that he should do so.

The A

Sir Wi
I:

CAT

is therefore made to transfer a certain share of popular y w second-rate Scotch novels, "the embryo fry, the little a:ry – etty children," issuing through Mr. Blackwood's shop operates a diversion, which does not affect us here of Waverley wears the palm of legendary lore alone. may, indeed, surfeit us: his imitators make us sick ' asked, it has been asked, “Have we no materials for rocna. England? Must we look to Scotland for a supply of winever original and striking in this kind?” And we answerEvery foot of soil is with us worked up; nearly every merca of the social machine is calculable. We have no rem violent catastrophes; for grotesque quaintnesses, for w.zitive a The last skirts of ignorance and barbarism are seen hver Sir Walter's pages) over the Border. We have, it is true. in this country as well as at the Cairn of Derncleugh t live under clipped hedges, and repose in camp bes, and perch on crags, like eagles, or take shelter, like sea thews, saltic subterranean caverns. We have heaths with rule he stones upon them: but no existing superstition envers the Geese of Micklestane-Moor, or sees a Black Dwart among them. We have sects in religion but the s sublime or ridiculous in that way is Mr Irving, the Cam. preacher, who comes like a satyr staring from the w. yet speaks like an orator" We had a Parson Adams 5 e hundred years ago--a Sir Roger de Coverley rather re hundred! Even Sir Walter is ordinarily obliged to pet à hy ar gle (strong as the hook is) a hundred miles to the North at an "Modern Athens" or a century back His last work,” indret mystical, is romantic in nothing but the title page Instead

• St. Ronan's Well.