e of
character is the product of past history, and embodies all the great
social forces by which it has slowly shaped itself. That is the new
element in his portraiture of human life; and we may pardon him if he
set rather too high a value upon the picturesque elements which he had
been the first to recognise. One of the acutest of recent writers upon
politics, the late Mr. Bagehot, has insisted upon the immense value of
what he called a 'solid cake of customs,' and the thought is more or
less familiar to every writer of the evolutionist way of thinking.
Scott, without any philosophy to speak of, political or otherwise, saw
and recognised intuitively a typical instance. He saw how much the
social fabric had been woven out of ancient tradition; and he made
others see it more clearly than could be done by any abstract reasoner.

When naturalists wish to preserve a skeleton, they bury an animal in an
ant-hill and dig him up after many days with all the perishable matter
fairly eaten away. That is the process which great men have to undergo.
A vast multitude of insignificant, unknown, and unconscious critics
destroy what has no genuine power of resistance, and leave the remainder
for posterity. Much disappears in every case, and it is a question,
perhaps, whether the firmer parts of Scott's reputation will be
sufficiently coherent to resist after the removal of the rubbish. We
must admit that even his best work is of more or less mixed value, and
that the test will be a severe one. Yet we hope, not only for reasons
already suggested, but for one which remains to be expressed. The
ultimate source of pleasure derivable from all art is that it brings you
into communication with the artist. What you really love in the picture
or the poem is the painter or the poet whom it brings into sympathy with
you across the gulf of time. He tells you what are the thoughts which
some fragment of natural scenery, or some incident of human life,
excited in a mind greatly wiser and more perceptive than your own. A
dramatist or a novelist professes to describe different actors on his
little scene, but he is really setting forth the varying phases of his
own mind. And so Dandie Dinmont, or the Antiquary, or Balfour of Burley,
is merely the conductor through which Scott's personal magnetism affects
our own natures. And certainly, whatever faults a critic may discover in
the work, it may be said that no work in our literature places us in
communic