Scotch people known to the world as Cervantes made Spain and
the Spaniards a reality for all times.

But he did more than Cervantes, for his creative mind reached over the
border into England and across the channel to France and Germany, and
even to the Holy Land, and found there historical types which he made
as real and as immortal as his own highland clansmen. His was the
great creative brain of the nineteenth century, and his work has made
the world his debtor. His work stimulated the best story teller of
France and gave the world _Monte Cristo_ and _The Three Guardsmen_. It
fired the imaginations of a score of English historical novelists; it
was the progenitor of Weyman's _A Soldier of France_ and Conan Doyle's
_Micah Clarke_ and _The White Company_.

Scott's mind was Shakespearean in its capacity for creating characters
of real flesh and blood; for making great historical personages as
real and vital as our next-door neighbors, and for bursts of sustained
story telling that carry the reader on for scores of pages without an
instant's drop in interest. Only the supreme masters in creative art
can accomplish these things. And the wonder of it is that Scott did
all these things without effort and without any self-consciousness. We
can not imagine Scott bragging about any of his books or his
characters, as Balzac did about Eugenie Grandet and others of his
French types. He was too big a man for any small vanities. But he was
as human as Shakespeare in his love of money, his desire to gather his
friends about him and his hearty enjoyment of good food and drink.

[Illustration: SIR WALTER SCOTT THIS PORTRAIT IS TAKEN FROM
CHANTREY'S BUST NOW AT ABBOTSFORD, WHICH, ACCORDING TO LOCKHART,
"ALONE PRESERVES FOR POSTERITY THE EXPRESSION MOST FONDLY
REMEMBERED BY ALL WHO EVER MINGLED IN HIS DOMESTIC CIRCLE"]

It has become the fashion among some of our hair-splitting critics to
decry Scott because of his carelessness in literary style, his
tendency to long introductions, and his fondness for description.
These critics will tell you that Turgeneff and Tolstoi are greater
literary artists than Scott, just as they tell you that Thackeray and
Dickens do not deserve a place among the foremost of English
novelists. This petty, finical criticism, which would measure
everything by its own rigid rule of literary art, loses sight of the
great primal fact that Scott created more real characters and told
more good stories th