and
perhaps also the range of his speculative ethics, he remained a
conventional moralist, and one, moreover, the type of whose
conventional code was borrowed more from that of honour than from that
of religious principle. There is one curious passage in his diary,
written very near the end of his life, in which Scott even seems to
declare that conventional standards of conduct are better, or at least
safer, than religious standards of conduct. He says in his diary for
the 15th April, 1828,--"Dined with Sir Robert Inglis, and met Sir
Thomas Acland, my old and kind friend. I was happy to see him. He may
be considered now as the head of the religious party in the House of
Commons--a powerful body which Wilberforce long commanded. It is a
difficult situation, for the adaptation of religious motives to
earthly policy is apt--among the infinite delusions of the human
heart--to be a snare."[37] His letters to his eldest son, the young
cavalry officer, on his first start in life, are much admired by Mr.
Lockhart, but to me they read a little hard, a little worldly, and
extremely conventional. Conventionality was certainly to his mind
almost a virtue.

Of enthusiasm in religion Scott always spoke very severely; both in his
novels and in his letters and private diary. In writing to Lord Montague,
he speaks of such enthusiasm as was then prevalent at Oxford, and which
makes, he says, "religion a motive and a pretext for particular lines of
thinking in politics and in temporal affairs" [as if it could help doing
that!] as "teaching a new way of going to the devil for God's sake," and
this expressly, because when the young are infected with it, it disunites
families, and sets "children in opposition to their parents."[38] He gives
us, however, one reason for his dread of anything like enthusiasm, which
is not conventional;--that it interferes with the submissive and tranquil
mood which is the only true religious mood. Speaking in his diary of a
weakness and fluttering at the heart, from which he had suffered, he says,
"It is an awful sensation, and would have made an enthusiast of me, had I
indulged my imagination on religious subjects. I have been always careful
to place my mind in the most tranquil posture which it can assume, during
my private exercises of devotion."[39] And in this avoidance of indulging
the imagination on religious, or even spiritual subjects, Scott goes far
beyond Shakespeare. I do not think there is a singl