e she loved
him,--which is confessed to be unheroic behaviour. Scott, in "Waverley,"
certainly does not linger over love-scenes. With Mr. Ruskin, we may say:
"Let it not be thought for an instant that the slight and sometimes
scornful glance with which Scott passes over scenes, which a novelist of
our own day would have analyzed with the airs of a philosopher, and
painted with the curiosity of a gossip, indicates any absence in his
heart of sympathy with the great and sacred elements of personal
happiness." But his mind entertained other themes of interest, "loyalty,
patriotism, piety." On the other hand, it is necessary to differ from Mr.
Ruskin when he says that Scott "never knew 'l'amor che move 'l sol e l'
altre stelle.'" He whose heart was "broken for two years," and retained
the crack till his dying day, he who, when old and tired, and near his
death, was yet moved by the memory of the name which thirty years before
he had cut in Runic characters on the turf at the Castle-gate of St.
Andrew, knew love too well to write of it much, or to speak of it at all.
He had won his ideal as alone the ideal can be won; he never lost her:
she was with him always, because she had been unattainable. "There are
few," he says, "who have not, at one period of life, broken ties of love
and friendship, secret disappointments of the heart, to mourn over,--and
we know no book which recalls the memory of them more severely than
'Julia de Roubigne.'" He could not be very eager to recall them, he who
had so bitterly endured them, and because he had known and always knew
"l'amor che move 'l sol e l'altre stelle," a seal was on his lips, a
silence broken only by a caress of Di Vernon's.'

This apology we may make, if an apology be needed, for what modern
readers may think the meagreness of the love-passages in Scott. He does
not deal in embraces and effusions, his taste is too manly; he does not
dwell much on Love, because, like the shepherd in Theocritus, he has
found him an inhabitant of the rocks. Moreover, when Scott began
novel-writing, he was as old as Thackeray when Thackeray said that while
at work on a love-scene he blushed so that you would think he was going
into an apoplexy. "Waverley" stands by its pictures of manners, of
character, by its humour and its tenderness, by its manly "criticism of
life," by its touches of poetry, so various, so inspired, as in Davie
Gellatley with his songs, and Charles Edward in the gallant hour of