Protestant race from which Scott received his best qualities. 'The
Scotch national character,' says Carlyle himself, 'originates in many
circumstances. First of all, the Saxon stuff there was to work on; but
next, and beyond all else except that, in the Presbyterian gospel of
John Knox. It seems a good national character, and, on some sides, not
so good. Let Scott thank John Knox, for he owed him much, little as he
dreamed of debt in that quarter! No Scotchman of his time was more
entirely Scotch than Walter Scott: the good and the not so good, which
all Scotchmen inherit, ran through every fibre of him.' Nothing more
true; and the words would be as strikingly appropriate if for Walter
Scott we substitute Thomas Carlyle. And to this source of sympathy we
might add others. Who in this generation could rival Scott's talent for
the picturesque, unless it be Carlyle? Who has done so much to apply the
lesson which Scott, as he says, first taught us--that the 'bygone ages
of the world were actually filled by living men, not by protocols,
state-papers, controversies, and abstractions of men'? If Scott would in
old days--I still quote his critic--have harried cattle in Tynedale or
cracked crowns in Redswire, would not Carlyle have thundered from the
pulpit of John Knox his own gospel, only in slightly altered
phraseology--that shams should not live but die, and that men should do
what work lies nearest to their hands, as in the presence of the
eternities and the infinite silences?

That last parallel reminds us that if there are points of similarity,
there are contrasts both wide and deep. The rugged old apostle had
probably a very low opinion of moss-troopers, and Carlyle has a message
to deliver to his fellow-creatures, which is not quite according to
Scott. And thus we see throughout his interesting essay a kind of
struggle between two opposite tendencies--a genuine liking for the man,
tempered by a sense that Scott dealt rather too much in those same shams
to pass muster with a stern moral censor. Nobody can touch Scott's
character more finely. There is a charming little anecdote which every
reader must remember: how there was a 'little Blenheim cocker' of
singular sensibility and sagacity; how the said cocker would at times
fall into musings like those of a Wertherean poet, and lived in
perpetual fear of strangers, regarding them all as potentially
dog-stealers; how the dog was, nevertheless, endowed with 'most amazing
m