e was not altogether wide of the mark.
The novels are all illustrations--not of 'gentlemen's seats' indeed, but
of various social states; and it is only by a kind of happy accident
when this interest in the surroundings does not put the chief characters
out of focus. Nobody has created a greater number of admirable types,
but when we run over their names we perceive that in most cases they are
the secondary performers who are ousting the nominal heroes and heroines
from their places. Dugald Dalgetty, for example, becomes so attractive
that he squeezes all the other actors into a mere corner of the canvas.
Perhaps nothing more is necessary to explain why Scott failed as a
dramatist. With him, Hamlet would have been a mere peg to show us how
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern amused themselves at the royal drinking
parties.

For this reason, again, Scott bestows an apparently disproportionate
amount of imagination upon the mere scene-painting, the external
trappings, the clothes, or dwelling-places of his performers. A
traveller into a strange country naturally gives us the external
peculiarities which strike him. Scott has to tell us what 'completed the
costume' of his Highland chiefs or mediaeval barons. He took, in short,
to that 'buff-jerkin' business of which Carlyle speaks so
contemptuously, and fairly carried away the hearts of his contemporaries
by a lavish display of mediaeval upholstery. Lockhart tells us that Scott
could not bear the commonplace daubings of walls with uniform coats of
white, blue, and grey. All the roofs at Abbotsford 'were, in appearance
at least, of carved oak, relieved by coats-of-arms duly blazoned at the
intersections of beams, and resting on cornices, to the eye of the same
material, but composed of casts in plaster of Paris, after the foliage,
the flowers, the grotesque monsters and dwarfs, and sometimes the
beautiful heads of nuns and confessors, on which he had doated from
infancy among the cloisters of Melrose Abbey.' The plaster looks as well
as the carved oak for a time; but the day speedily comes when the sham
crumbles into ashes, and Scott's knights and nobles, like his carved
cornices, became dust in the next generation. It is hard to say it, and
yet we fear it must be admitted, that many of those historical novels,
which once charmed all men, and for which we have still a lingering
affection, are rapidly converting themselves into mere debris of plaster
of Paris. Sir F. Palgrave says