ntion
to trace the character or to enumerate the works of the great man whose
career is run;--to every eye that reads--every ear that hears--every
heart that remembers, this much at least, of his character is already
known,--that he had all the exuberance of genius and none of its
excesses; that he was at once equitable and generous--that his heart was
ever open to charity--that his life has probably been shortened by his
scrupulous regard for justice. His career was one splendid refutation of
the popular fallacy, that genius has of necessity vices--that its light
must be meteoric--and its courses wayward and uncontrolled. He has left
mankind two great lessons,--we scarcely know which is the most valuable.
He has taught us how much delight one human being can confer upon the
world; he has taught us also that the imagination may aspire to the
wildest flights without wandering into error. Of whom else among our
great list of names--the heir-looms of our nation--can we say that he
has left us everything to admire, and nothing to forgive?

It is in four different paths of intellectual eminence that Sir Walter
Scott has won his fame; as a poet, a biographer, an historian, and a
novellist. It is not now a time (with the great man's clay scarce cold)
to enter into the niceties of critical discussion. We cannot now weigh,
and sift, and compare. We feel too deeply at this moment to reason
well---but we ourselves would incline to consider him greatest as a
poet. Never, indeed, has there been a poet so thoroughly Homeric as
Scott--the battle--the feast--the council--the guard-room at
Stirling--the dying warrior at Flodden--the fierce Bertram speeding up
the aisle--all are Homeric;--all live--move--breathe and burn--alike
poetry, but alike life! There is this difference, too, marked and
prominent--between his verse and his prose;--the first is emphatically
the verse of Scott--the latter (we mean in its style) may be the prose
of any one--the striking originality, the daring boldness, the
astonishing vigour of the style, in the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_,
are lost in _The Antiquary and Guy Mannering_.

Scott may be said, in prose, to have _no style_. There are those,
we know, who call this very absence of style a merit--we will not
dispute it: if it be so, Scott is the first great prose writer from
Bacon to Gibbon,--nay, from Herodotus, in Greek, to Paul Courier, in
French--who has laid claim to it. For our own part, we think him g