nd leave the small gossip
of the company at the Wells as, relatively at least, a failure. And it
is well for all the world that it was so. The domestic novel, when
really of the highest kind, is no doubt a perfect work of art, and an
unfailing source of amusement; but it has nothing of the tonic
influence, the large instructiveness, the stimulating intellectual
air, of Scott's historic tales. Even when Scott is farthest from
reality--as in _Ivanhoe_ or _The Monastery_--he makes you open your
eyes to all sorts of historical conditions to which you would
otherwise be blind. The domestic novel, even when its art is perfect,
gives little but pleasure at the best; at the worst it is simply
scandal idealized.

Scott often confessed his contempt for his own heroes. He said of
Edward Waverley, for instance, that he was "a sneaking piece of
imbecility," and that "if he had married Flora, she would have set him
up upon the chimney-piece as Count Borowlaski's wife used to do with
him. I am a bad hand at depicting a hero, properly so called, and
have an unfortunate propensity for the dubious characters of
borderers, buccaneers, highland robbers, and all others of a
Robin-Hood description."[33] In another letter he says, "My rogue
always, in despite of me, turns out my hero."[34] And it seems very
likely that in most of the situations Scott describes so well, his own
course would have been that of his wilder impulses, and not that of
his reason. Assuredly he would never have stopped hesitating on the
line between opposite courses as his Waverleys, his Mortons, his
Osbaldistones do. Whenever he was really involved in a party strife,
he flung prudence and impartiality to the winds, and went in like the
hearty partisan which his strong impulses made of him. But granting
this, I do not agree with his condemnation of all his own colourless
heroes. However much they differed in nature from Scott himself, the
even balance of their reason against their sympathies is certainly
well conceived, is in itself natural, and is an admirable expedient
for effecting that which was probably its real use to Scott,--the
affording an opportunity for the delineation of all the pros and cons
of the case, so that the characters on both sides of the struggle
should be properly understood. Scott's imagination was clearly far
wider--was far more permeated with the fixed air of sound
judgment--than his practical impulses. He needed a machinery for
displaying