thing to have a mind of such power and such influence,
whose recognitions of right and wrong, of virtue and vice, were, in most
cases, so clear and determined. He never enlists our sympathies in favor
of vice, by drawing those seductive pictures, in which it comes so near
the shape and form of virtue that the mind is puzzled as to the boundary
line. He never makes young ladies feel that they would like to marry
corsairs, pirates, or sentimental villains of any description. The most
objectionable thing, perhaps, about his influence, is its sympathy with
the war spirit. A person Christianly educated can hardly read some of
his descriptions in the Lady of the Lake and Marmion without an emotion
of disgust, like what is excited by the same things in Homer; and as the
world comes more and more under the influence of Christ, it will recede
more and more from this kind of literature.

Scott has been censured as being wilfully unjust to the Covenanters and
Puritans. I think he meant really to deal fairly by them, and that what
_he_ called fairness might seem rank injustice to those brought up to
venerate them, as we have been. I suppose that in Old Mortality it was
Scott's honest intention to balance the two parties about fairly, by
putting on the Covenant side his good, steady, well-behaved hero, Mr.
Morton, who is just as much of a Puritan as the Puritans would have been
had they taken Sir Walter Scott's advice; that is to say, a very nice,
sensible, moral man, who takes the Puritan side because he thinks it the
_right_ side, but contemplates all the devotional enthusiasm and
religious ecstasies of his associates from a merely artistic and
pictorial point of view. The trouble was, when he got his model Puritan
done, nobody ever knew what he was meant for; and then all the young
ladies voted steady Henry Morton a bore, and went to falling in love
with his Cavalier rival, Lord Evandale, and people talked as if it was a
preconcerted arrangement of Scott, to surprise the female heart, and
carry it over to the royalist side.

The fact was, in describing Evandale he made a living, effective
character, because he was describing something he had full sympathy
with, and put his whole life into; but Henry Morton is a laborious
arrangement of starch and pasteboard to produce one of those
supposititious, just-right men, who are always the stupidest of mortals
after they are made. As to why Scott did not describe such a character
as the