her power,' is dead. We shall never get anybody
outside the necessarily small number of those who have cultivated the
historic as well as the aesthetic sense in literature, to read him except
as a curiosity or a task, because he not merely cultivated art, but
neglected nature for it; because he fooled the time to the top of its
bent, and let the time fool him in return; because, instead of making
the common as though it were not common, he aimed and strained at the
uncommon _in_ and _per se_.

Scott did just the contrary. He never tried to be unlike somebody else;
if he hit, as he did hit, upon great new styles of
literature,--absolutely new in the case of the historical novel, revived
after long trance in the case of the verse tale,--it was from no desire
to innovate, but because his genius called him. Though in ordinary ways
he was very much a man of his time, he did not contort himself in any
fashion by way of expressing a (then) modern spirit, a Georgian
idiosyncrasy, or anything of that sort; he was content with the language
of the best writers and the thoughts of the best men. He was no amateur
of the topsy-turvy, and had not the very slightest desire to show how a
literary head could grow beneath the shoulders. He was satisfied that
his genius should flow naturally. And the consequence is that it was
never checked, that it flows still for us with all its spontaneous
charm, and that it will flow _in omne volubilis aevum_. Among many
instances of the strength which accompanied this absence of strain one
already alluded to may be mentioned again. Scott is one of the most
literary of all writers. He was saturated with reading; nothing could
happen but it brought some felicitous quotation, some quaint parallel to
his mind from the great wits, or the small, of old. Yet no writer is
less _bookish_ than he; none insults his readers less with any parade,
with any apparent consciousness of erudition; and he wears his learning
so lightly that pedants have even accused him of lacking it because he
lacks pedantry. His stream, to resume the simile, carries in solution
more reading as well as more wit, more knowledge of life and nature,
more gifts of almost all kinds than would suffice for twenty men of
letters, yet the very power of its solvent force, as well as the vigour
of its current, makes these things comparatively invisible.

In dealing with an author so voluminous and so various in his kinds and
subjects of compositio