to accept the theory of the passive
mind as a sufficient philosophical explanation of the Scotch novels. But
Hazlitt is certainly right to make much of the store of reading and
reminiscence they imply, and it is not erroneous or fallacious to think
of all Scott's writings in verse or prose as peculiarly the fruits of
his life and experience. His various modes of writing are suggested to
him by the way, and he finds his art with no long practice when the
proper time comes to use it. After all, is this not what was meant by
Horace when he said that the subject rightly chosen will provide what is
wanted in art and style?

Cui lecta potenter erit res
Nec facundia deseret hunc nec lucidus ordo.

It was chosen by Corneille as a motto for _Cinna_; it would do as a
summary of all the writings of Scott.

The Waverley Novels may be reckoned among the works of fiction that have
had their origin in chance, and have turned out something different from
what the author intended. Reading the life of Scott, we seem to be
following a pilgrimage where the traveller meets with different
temptations and escapes various dangers, and takes up a number of
duties, and is led to do a number of fine things which he had not
thought of till the time came for attempting them. The poet and the
novelist are revealed in the historian and the collector of antiquities.
Scott before _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_ looked like a young
adventurer in the study of history and legend, who had it in him to do
solid work on a large scale (like his edition of Dryden) if he chose to
take it up. He is not a poet from the beginning like Wordsworth and
Keats, devoted to that one service; he turns novelist late in life when
the success of his poetry seems to be over. His early experiments in
verse are queerly suggested and full of hazard. It needs a foreign
language--German--to encourage him to rhyme. The fascination of Buerger's
_Lenore_ is a reflection from English ballad poetry; the reflected image
brought out what had been less remarkable in the original. The German
devices of terror and wonder are a temptation to Scott; they hang about
his path with their monotonous and mechanical jugglery, their horrors
made all the more intolerable through the degraded verse of Lewis--a bad
example which Scott instinctively refused to follow, though he most
unaccountably praised Lewis's sense of rhythm. The close of the
eighteenth century cannot be fu