uches the maudlin; if
his romantic sentiment is always saved by the sense of solid fact,--and
we may assert these things without hesitation or qualification,--it is
due to his humour. For this humour, never merely local, never bases its
appeal on small private sympathies and understandings and pass-words
which leave the world at large cold, or mystified, or even disgusted.
Nor is it perhaps uncritical to set down that pre-eminently happy use,
without abuse, of dialect, which has attracted the admiration of almost
all good judges, to this same humour, warning him alike against the
undisciplined profusion and the injudicious selection which have not
been and are not unknown in some followers of his. And, further, his
universal quality is free from some accompanying drawbacks which must be
acknowledged in the humour of some of the other very great humorists. It
is not coarse--a defect which has made prigs at all times, and
especially at this time, affect horror at Aristophanes; it is not grim,
like that of Swift; it is free from any very strong evidences of its
owner having lived at a particular date, such as may be detected by the
Devil's Advocate even in Fielding, even in Thackeray. No tricks or
grimaces, no mere elaboration, no lingering to bespeak applause; but a
moment of life and nature subjected to the humour-stamp and left
recorded and transformed for ever--there is Scott.

That the necessary counterpart and companion of this breadth of humour
should be depth of feeling can be no surprise to those who accept the
only sound distinction between humour and wit. Scott himself never wore
his heart on his sleeve; but to those who looked a little farther than
the sleeve its beatings were sufficiently evident. The Scott who made
that memorable exclamation on the Mound, and ejaculated 'No, by----!' at
the discovery of the Regalia,[47] who wrote Jeanie's speech to Queen
Caroline and Habakkuk Mucklewrath's to Claverhouse, had no need ever to
affect emotion, because it was always present, though repressed when it
had no business to exhibit itself. And his romantic imagination was as
sincere as his pathos or his indignation. He never lost the clue to 'the
shores of old romance'; and, at least, great part of the secret which
made him such a magician to his readers was that the spell was on
himself--that the regions of fancy were as open, as familiar as Princes
Street or the Parliament Square to this solid practical Clerk of
Sess