enough to make them individual,
his fancy carrying him otherwhere, and leaving him scarce the time to
put his jotting down. To Shakspeare the great ideals whom he almost
alone has been able to make into flesh and blood; to Scott all the
surrounding world, the men as we meet them about the common
thoroughfares of life. He knows no Rosalind nor Imogen, but on the other
hand Jeanie Deans and Jenny Headrigg would have been impossible to his
great predecessor. Both, we may remark, are incapable of a young
hero--the Claudios and the Bertrams being if anything a trifle worse
than Henry Morton and Young Lovel. But whereas Shakspeare is greatest
above that line of the conventional ideal, it is below that Sir Walter
is famous. The one has no restriction, however high he may soar; the
other finds nothing so common that he cannot make it immortal.

[Illustration: ST. GILES'S FROM PRINCES STREET]

It is, however, especially in the breadth and largeness of a humanity
which has scarcely any limit to its sympathy and understanding that the
great romancist of Scotland resembles the greatest of English poets.
They are both so great, so broad, so little restrained by any individual
limitations, that a perverse criticism has made this catholic and
all-comprehending nature a kind of reproach to both, as though that
great and limpid mirror of their minds, in which all nature was
reflected, was less noble than the sharp face of a stone which can catch
but one ray. They were both subject to political prejudices and
prepossessions. Shakspeare has made of many a youth of the nineteenth
century an ardent Lancastrian, ready to pluck a red rose with Somerset
and die for Margaret and her prince; and Scott in like manner has made
many a Jacobite, though in the latter case our novelist is too full of
sense even in the midst of his own inclinations to become ever an
out-and-out partisan. But, except these prepossessions, they have no
_parti pris_. Every faction renders up its soul of meaning, the most
diverse figures unclose themselves side by side. The wit, the scholar,
the true soldier, the braggart and thief, the Jew and the Christian, the
Hamlet, hero of all time, and Shallow and Slender from the fat pastures
of English rural life, come all together, each as true as if on him
alone the poet's eye had fixed. And Scott is like him, setting before us
with unerring pencil the old superstitious despot of mediaeval France,
the bustling pedant of St. Jam