riting, beside the letters of Cowper, or of
Lamb. They are just the common-sense epistles of a man who to his last
day remained too modest to believe in the extent of his own genius.
The letters in this collection which show most acuteness on literary
matters are not Scott's, but Lady Louisa Stuart's, who appreciated
the Novels on their appearance (their faults as well as their merits)
with a judiciousness quite wonderful in a contemporary. Scott's
literary observations (with the exception of one passage where the
attitude of an English gentleman towards literature is stated
thus--"he asks of it that it shall arouse him from his habitual
contempt of what goes on about him") are much less amusing; and his
letters to Joanna Baillie the dullest in the volume, unless it be the
answers which Joanna Baillie sent. Best of all, perhaps, is the
correspondence (scarcely used by Lockhart) between Scott and Lady
Abercorn, with its fitful intervals of warmth and reserve. This alone
would justify Mr. Douglas's volumes. But, indeed, while nothing can be
found now to alter men's conception of Scott, any book about him is
justified, even if it do no more than heap up superfluous testimony to
the beauty of his character.

* * * * *

June 15, 1895. A racial disability.

Since about one-third of the number of my particular friends happen to
be Scotsmen, it has always distressed and annoyed me that, with the
best will in the world, I have never been able to understand on what
principle that perfervid race conducts its enthusiasms. Mine is a
racial disability, of course; and the converse has been noted by no
less a writer than Stevenson, in the story of his journey "Across the
Plains":--

"There were no emigrants direct from Europe--save one German
family and a knot of Cornish miners who kept grimly by
themselves, one reading the New Testament all day long through
steel spectacles, the rest discussing privately the secrets of
their old-world mysterious race. Lady Hester Stanhope believed
she could make something great of the Cornish; for my part I can
make nothing of them at all. A division of races, older and more
original than that of Babel, keeps this dose, esoteric family
apart from neighbouring Englishmen."

The loss on my side, to be sure, would be immensely the greater, were
it not happily certain that I _can_ make something of Scotsmen; can,
and indeed