objecting to the finale,--it has been
admitted that Scott was never good at a conclusion,--and personally I
have always thought George Staunton uninteresting throughout. But how
much does this leave! The description of the lynching of Porteous and
the matchless interview with Queen Caroline are only the very best of
such a series of good things that, except just at the end, it may be
said to be uninterrupted. Jeanie it is unnecessary to praise; the same
Lady Louisa's admiration of the wonderful art which could attract so
much interest to a plain, good, not clever, almost middle-aged woman
sums up all. But almost everyone plays up to Jeanie in perfection--her
father and, to no small extent, her sister, her husband and Dumbiedykes,
Madge Wildfire (a most difficult and most successful character) and her
old fiend of a mother, the Duke and the tobacco-shop keeper. Abundant as
are the good things afterwards, I do not know that Scott ever showed his
actual original genius, his faculty of creation and combination, to such
an extent and in such proportion again.

He certainly did not, so far as my taste goes, in _The Bride of
Lammermoor_, a book which, putting the mere fragment of the _Black
Dwarf_ aside, seems to me his first approach to failure in prose.
Lockhart, whose general critical opinions deserve the profoundest
respect, thought differently--thought it, indeed, 'the most pure and
perfect of all the tragedies that Scott ever penned.' Perhaps there is
something in this of the same ingenuity which Scott himself showed in
his disclaimer to Murray quoted above, for tragedy _per se_ was
certainly not Scott's forte to the same extent as were comedy and
history. But I know that there are many who agree with Lockhart. On the
other hand, I should say that while we do not know enough of the House
of Ravenswood to feel much sympathy with its fortunes as a house, the
'conditions,' in the old sense, of its last representative are not such
as to attract us much to him personally. He is already far too much of
that hero of opera which he was destined to become, a sulky, stagy
creature, in theatrical poses and a black-plumed hat, who cannot even
play the easy and perennially attractive part of _desdichado_ so as to
keep our compassion. Lucy is a simpleton so utter and complete that it
is difficult even to be sorry for her, especially as Ravenswood would
have made a detestable husband. The mother is meant to be and is a
repulsive virag