ouse of Wisdom of Cairo, and with the
Templars; and if Scott's gypsy Hayraddin Maugrabin is to be supposed one
of that type of Hindu outcasts, which were of all others most hateful to
the orthodox Moslem invader, we cannot sufficiently admire the
appropriateness with which doctrines which were actually held by the
most deeply initiated among the Pariahs were put into his mouth. To have
made a merely vulgar, nothing-believing, and as little reflecting gypsy,
as philosophical as the wanderer in 'Quentin Durward,' would have been
absurd. There is a vigor, an earnestness in his creed, which betrays
culture and thought, and which is marvellously appropriate if we regard
him as a wandering scion of the outcast Pariah illuminati of India.

Did our author owe this insight to erudition or to poetic intuition? In
either case we discover a depth which few would have surmised. It was
once said of Scott, that he was a millionaire of genius whose wealth was
all in small change--that his scenes and characters were all massed from
a vast collection of little details. This would be equivalent to
declaring that he was a great novelist without a great idea. Perhaps
this is true, but the clairvoyance of genius which _seems_ to manifest
itself in the two characters which I have already examined, and the
cautious manner in which he has treated them, would appear to prove that
he possessed a rarer gift than that of 'great ideas'--the power of
controlling them. Such ideas may make reformers, critics, politicians,
essayists--but they generally ruin a novelist--and Scott knew it.

A third character belonging to the class under consideration, is Henbane
Dwining, the 'pottingar,' apothecary or 'leech,' in the novel of 'The
Fair Maid of Perth.'

This man is rather developed by his deeds than his words, and these are
prompted by two motives, terrible vindictiveness and the pride of
superior knowledge. He is vile from the former, and yet almost heroic
from the latter, for it is briefly impossible to make any man intensely
self-reliant, and base this self-reliance on great learning in men and
books, without displaying in him some elements of superiority. He is so
radically bad that by contrast one of the greatest villains in Scottish
history, Sir John Ramorney, appears rather gray than black; and yet we
dislike him less than the knight, possibly because we know that men of
the Dwining stamp, when they have had the control of nations, often do
good s