of people's real minds!

'No eyes the rocks discover
Which lurk beneath the deep.'

Life could not be endured were it seen in reality." But this is not
irony, only the sort of meditation which, in a mind inclined to thrust
deep into the secrets of life's paradoxes, is apt to lead to irony.
Scott, however, does not thrust deep in this direction. He met the
cold steel which inflicts the deepest interior wounds, like a soldier,
and never seems to have meditated on the higher paradoxes of life till
reason reeled. The irony of Hamlet is far from Scott. His imagination
was essentially one of distinct embodiment. He never even seemed so
much as to contemplate that sundering of substance and form, that
rending away of outward garments, that unclothing of the soul, in
order that it might be more effectually clothed upon, which is at the
heart of anything that may be called spiritual irony. The constant
abiding of his mind within the well-defined forms of some one or other
of the conditions of outward life and manners, among the scores of
different spheres of human habit, was, no doubt, one of the secrets of
his genius; but it was also its greatest limitation.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 32: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, iv. 171-3.]

[Footnote 33: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, iv. 175-6.]

[Footnote 34: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, iv. 46.]

[Footnote 35: Carlyle's _Miscellaneous Essays_, iv. 174-5.]

CHAPTER XI.

MORALITY AND RELIGION.

The very same causes which limited Scott's humour and irony to the
commoner fields of experience, and prevented him from ever introducing
into his stories characters of the highest type of moral
thoughtfulness, gave to his own morality and religion, which were, I
think, true to the core so far as they went, a shade of distinct
conventionality. It is no doubt quite true, as he himself tells us,
that he took more interest in his mercenaries and moss-troopers,
outlaws, gipsies, and beggars, than he did in the fine ladies and
gentlemen under a cloud whom he adopted as heroines and heroes. But
that was the very sign of his conventionalism. Though he interested
himself more in these irregular persons, he hardly ever ventured to
paint their inner life so as to show how little there was to choose
between the sins of those who are at war with society and the sins of
those who bend to the yoke of society. He widened rather than narrowed
the chasm between the outlaw and the respectable ci