es's, the ploughmen and shepherds, the
churchmen, the Border reivers and Highland caterans, the broad country
lying under a natural illumination, without strain or effort, large and
temperate as the day. Neither in the greatest poet nor the great
romancer is there any force put upon the natural fulness of life to
twist its record into a narrow circle with one motive only. It is the
round world and all that it inhabits, the grandeur and divinity of a
universe, that delights them. Their view is large as the vision of God,
or as nearly so as is given to mortal eyes. It is in this, above all,
that they resemble each other. In degree Shakspeare, it need not be
said, is all-transcendent, reaching heights such as no other man has
reached in delineation and creation: but Scott is of his splendid
species, one of his kind, the only one among all the many sons of genius
with whom this island has been blessed, for whom the boldest could make
such a claim.

Walter Scott belongs to all Scotland. He was, no man more, a lover of
the woods and fields, of mountain-sides and pastoral braes, of the river
and forest, Ettrick and Tweed and Yarrow, and Perthshire--that princely
district, half Highland, half Lowland--and the chain of silvery lochs
that pierce the mountain shadows through Stirling and Argyle: every
league of the fair country he loved. From the Western Isles and the
Orkneys to the very fringe of debatable land which parts the northern
and the southern half of Great Britain--is his, and has tokens to show
of his presence. When he came home to die at the end of almost the most
tragic yet most noble chapter of individual history which our century
has known, it was the longing of his sick heart above all other that he
should not be so unblest as to lay his bones far from the Tweed.

But yet, above all other places, it was to Edinburgh that Scott
belonged. His birth, his growth, the familiar scenes of his youth, his
education and training, the business and work of his life, were all
associated with the ancient capital. George Square--with its homely and
comfortable old-fashion, which has nothing to do with antiquity, the
first breaking out of the Edinburgh citizens into large space and air
outside the strait boundaries of the city, with the Meadows and their
trees beyond, and all the sunshine of the south side to warm the deep
_corps de logis_, the substantial and solid mansions which are so grey
without yet so full of warmth and co