, should have been that of Sir
Walter. Amid scenes so heightened in interest by his genius as those of
Orkney, he is entitled to a monument. To the critical student of the
philosophy and history of poetic invention it is not uninstructive to
observe how completely the novelist has appropriated and brought within
the compass of one fiction, in defiance of all those lower probabilities
which the lawyer who pleaded before a jury court would be compelled to
respect, almost every interesting scene and object in both the Shetland
and Orkney islands. There was but little intercourse in those days
between the two northern archipelagos. It is not yet thirty years since
they communicated with each other, chiefly through the port of Leith,
where their regular traders used to meet monthly; but it was necessary,
for purposes of effect, that the dreary sublimities of Shetland should
be wrought up into the same piece of rich tissue with the imposing
antiquities of Orkney,--Sumburgh Head and Roost with the ancient
Cathedral of St. Magnus and the earl's palace, and Fitful Head and the
sand-enveloped kirk of St. Ringan with the Standing Stones of Stennis
and the Dwarfie Stone of Hoy; and so the little jury-court probabilities
have been sacrificed without scruple, and that higher truth of
character, and that exquisite portraiture of external nature, which give
such reality to fiction, and make it sink into the mind more deeply than
historic fact, have been substituted instead. But such,--considerably to
the annoyance of the lesser critics,--has been ever the practice of the
greater poets. The lesser critics are all critics of the jury-court
cast; while all the great masters of fiction, with Shakspeare at their
head, have been asserters of that higher truth which is not letter, but
spirit, and contemners of the mere judicial probabilities. And so they
have been continually fretting the little men with their extravagances,
and they ever will. What were said to be the originals of two of Sir
Walter's characters in the "Pirate" were living in the neighborhood of
Stromness only a few years ago. An old woman who resided immediately
over the town, in a little cottage, of which there now remains only the
roofless walls, and of whom the sailors, weather-bound in the port, used
occasionally to purchase a wind, furnished him with the first conception
of his Norna of the Fitful Head; and an eccentric shopkeeper of the
place, who to his dying day used t