the reputation on which he set so little store survives. A constant tide
of new editions of his novels flows from the press; his plots give
materials for operas and plays; he has been criticised, praised,
condemned: but his romances endure amid the changes of taste, remaining
the delight of mankind, while new schools and little masters of fiction
come and go.

Scott himself believed that even great works usually suffer periods of
temporary occultation. His own, no doubt, have not always been in their
primitive vogue. Even at first, English readers complained of the
difficulty caused by his Scotch, and now many make his I "dialect" an
excuse for not reading books which their taste, debauched by third-rate
fiction, is incapable of enjoying. But Scott has never disappeared in one
of those irregular changes of public opinion remarked on by his friend
Lady Louisa Stuart. In 1821 she informed him that she had tried the
experiment of reading Mackenzie's "Man of Feeling" aloud: "Nobody cried,
and at some of the touches I used to think so exquisite, they
laughed."--[Abbotsford Manuscripts.]--His correspondent requested Scott
to write something on such variations of taste, which actually seem to be
in the air and epidemic, for they affect, as she remarked, young people
who have not heard the criticisms of their elders.--[See Scott's reply,
with the anecdote about Mrs. Aphra Behn's novels, Lockhart, vi. 406
(edition of 1839).]--Thus Rousseau's "Nouvelle Heloise," once so
fascinating to girls, and reputed so dangerous, had become tedious to the
young, Lady Louisa says, even in 1821. But to the young, if they have any
fancy and intelligence, Scott is not tedious even now; and probably his
most devoted readers are boys, girls, and men of matured appreciation and
considerable knowledge of literature. The unformed and the cultivated
tastes are still at one about Scott. He holds us yet with his
unpremeditated art, his natural qualities of friendliness, of humour, of
sympathy. Even the carelessness with which his earliest and his kindest
critics--Ellis, Erskine, and Lady Louisa Stuart--reproached him has not
succeeded in killing his work and diminishing his renown.

It is style, as critics remind us, it is perfection of form, no doubt,
that secure the permanence of literature; but Scott did not overstate his
own defects when he wrote in his Journal (April 22, 1826): "A solecism in
point of composition, like a Scotch word, is indifferent