the humorous
Irish sketches of Miss Edgeworth. As Scott always insisted, it was mainly
"the extended and well-merited fame of Miss Edgeworth" which induced him
to try his hand on a novel containing pictures of Scottish life and
character. Nothing was more remarkable in his own novels than the
blending of close and humorous observation of common life with pleasure
in adventurous narratives about "what is not so, and was not so, and
Heaven forbid that it ever should be so," as the girl says in the nursery
tale. Through his whole life he remained the dreamer of dreams and teller
of wild legends, who had held the lads of the High School entranced round
Luckie Brown's fireside, and had fleeted the summer days in interchange
of romances with a schoolboy friend, Mr. Irving, among the hills that
girdle Edinburgh. He ever had a passion for "knights and ladies and
dragons and giants," and "God only knows," he says, "how delighted I was
to find myself in such society." But with all this delight, his
imagination had other pleasures than the fantastic: the humours and
passions of ordinary existence were as clearly visible to him as the
battles, the castles, and the giants. True, he was more fastidious in his
choice of novels of real life than in his romantic reading. "The whole
Jemmy and Jessamy tribe I abhorred," he said; "and it required the art of
Burney or the feeling of Mackenzie to fix my attention upon a domestic
tale." But when the domestic tale was good and true, no man appreciated
it more than he. None has more vigorously applauded Miss Austen than
Scott, and it was thus that as the "Author of 'Waverley'" he addressed
Miss Edgeworth, through James Ballantyne: "If I could but hit it, Miss
Edgeworth's wonderful power of vivifying all her persons, and making
there live as beings in your mind, I should not be afraid." "Often,"
Ballantyne goes on, "has the Author of 'Waverley' used such language to
me; and I knew that I gratified him most when I could say, 'Positively,
this is equal to Miss Edgeworth.'"

Thus Scott's own taste was catholic: and in this he was particularly
unlike the modern novelists, who proclaim, from both sides of the
Atlantic, that only in their own methods, and in sharing their own
exclusive tastes, is literary salvation. The prince of Romance was no
one-sided romanticiste; his ear was open to all fiction good in its kind.
His generosity made him think Miss Edgeworth's persons more alive than
his own. To h