; the Deanses were survivals from the days of the Covenanters
or of John Knox; every peculiarity upon which he delighted to dwell was
invested with all the charm of descent from a long and picturesque
history. When Fielding describes the squires or lawyers of the
eighteenth century, he says nothing to show that he was even aware of
the existence of a seventeenth, or still less of a sixteenth century.
Scott can describe no character without assigning to it its place in
the social organism which has been growing up since the earliest dawn of
history. This was, of course, no accident. He came at the time when the
little provincial centres were just feeling the first invasion of the
great movements from without. Edinburgh, whether quite comparable to
Athens or not, had been for two or three generations a remarkable centre
of intellectual cultivation. Hume and Adam Smith were only the most
conspicuous members of a society which monopolised pretty well all the
philosophy which existed in the island and a great deal of the history
and criticism. In Scott's time the patriotic feeling which had been a
blind instinct was becoming more or less self-conscious. The literary
society in which Scott was leader of the Tories, and Jeffrey of the
Whigs, included a large proportion of the best intellect of the time and
was sufficiently in contact with the outside world to be conscious of
its own characteristics. When the crash of the French Revolution came in
Scott's youth, Burke denounced its _a priori_ abstract reasonings in the
name of prescription. A traditional order and belief were essential, as
he urged, to the well-being of every human society. What Scott did
afterwards was precisely to show by concrete instances, most vividly
depicted, the value and interest of a natural body of traditions. Like
many other of his ablest contemporaries, he saw with alarm the great
movement, of which the French Revolution was the obvious embodiment,
sweeping away all manner of local traditions and threatening to engulf
the little society which still retained its specific character in
Scotland. He was stirred, too, in his whole nature when any sacrilegious
reformer threatened to sweep away any part of the true old Scottish
system. And this is, in fact, the moral implicitly involved in Scott's
best work. Take the beggar, for example, Edie Ochiltree, the old
'bluegown.' Beggars, you say, are a nuisance and would be sentenced to
starvation by Mr. Malthus