l in Scott that life "means intensely and means
good." A certain amount of lovable partisanship and prejudice
goes with the view, not un-welcomely; there is also some
carelessness as to the minute details of fact. But the effect of
truth, both in character and setting, is overwhelming. Scott has
vivified English and Scotch history more than all the history
books: he saw it himself--so we see it. One of the reasons his
work rings true--whereas Mrs. Radcliffe's adventure tales seem
fictitious as well as feeble--is because it is the natural
outcome of his life: all his interest, his liking, his belief
went into the Novels. When he sat down at the mature age of
forty-three to make fiction, there was behind him the large part
of a lifetime of unconscious preparation for what he had to do:
for years he had been steeped in the folk-lore and legend of his
native country; its local history had been his hobby; he had not
only read its humbler literature but wandered widely among its
people, absorbed its language and its life, felt "the very pulse
of the machine." Hence he differed toto caelo from an
archeologist turned romancer like the German Ebers: being rather
a genial traveler who, after telling tales of his experiences by
word of mouth at the tavern hearth, sets them down upon paper
for better preservation. He had been no less student than
pedestrian in the field; lame as he was, he had footed his way
to many a tall memorial of a hoary past, and when still hardly
more than a boy, burrowed among the manuscripts of the
Advocates' Library in Edinburgh, making himself an able
antiquary at a time when most youth are idling or philandering.
Moreover, he was himself the son of a border chief and knew
minstrelsy almost at his nurse's knee: and the lilt of a ballad
was always like wine to his heart. It makes you think of Sir
Philip Sidney's splendid testimony to such an influence: "I
never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not
my heart moved more than with a trumpet."

All this could not but tell; the incidents in a book like
"Waverley" are unforced: the advance of the story closely
imitates Life in its ever-shifting succession of events: the
reader soon learns to trust the author's faculty of invention.
Plot, story-interest, is it not the backbone of romantic
fiction? And Scott, though perchance he may not conduct it so
swiftly as pleases the modern taste, may be relied on to furnish
it.

In the earlier peri