r once a year he thought he should die. Everybody who has
refreshed himself with mountain and moor this summer should feel how
much we owe, and how much more we are likely to owe in future, to the
man who first inoculated us with his own enthusiasm, and who is still
the best interpreter of the 'honest grey hills.' Scott's poetical
faculty may, perhaps, be more felt in his prose than his verse. The fact
need not be decided; but as we read the best of his novels we feel
ourselves transported to the 'distant Cheviot's blue;' mixing with the
sturdy dalesmen, and the tough indomitable puritans of his native land;
for their sakes we can forgive the exploded feudalism and the faded
romance which he attempted with less success to galvanise into life. The
pleasure of that healthy open-air life, with that manly companion, is
not likely to diminish; and Scott as its exponent may still retain a
hold upon our affections which would have been long ago forfeited if he
had depended entirely on his romantic nonsense. We are rather in the
habit of talking about a healthy animalism, and try most elaborately to
be simple and manly. When we turn from our modern professors in that
line, who affect a total absence of affectation, to Scott's Dandie
Dinmonts and Edie Ochiltrees, we see the difference between the sham and
the reality, and fancy that Scott may still have a lesson or two to
preach to this generation. Those to come must take care of themselves.

_NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE_

The most obvious fact about Hawthorne is that he gave one solution of
the problem what elements of romance are discoverable amongst the harsh
prose of this prosaic age. How is the novelist who, by the inevitable
conditions of his style, is bound to come into the closest possible
contact with facts, who has to give us the details of his hero's
clothes, to tell us what he had for breakfast, and what is the state of
the balance at his banker's--how is he to introduce the ideal element
which must, in some degree, be present in all genuine art? What
precisely is meant by 'ideal' is a question which for the moment I
pretermit. Anyhow a mere photographic reproduction of this muddy,
money-making, bread-and-butter-eating world would be intolerable. At the
very lowest, some effort must be made at least to select the most
promising materials, and to strain out the coarse or the simply prosaic
ingredients. Various attempts have been made to solve the problem since
De Foe