eir mountain air. Women like Rose Bradwardine and Ailie
Dinmont were the grace and guard of almost every household (God be
praised that the race of them is not yet extinct, for all that Mall or
Boulevard can do), and it has perhaps escaped the notice of even
attentive readers that the comparatively uninteresting character of Sir
Walter's heroes had always been studied among a class of youths who were
simply incapable of doing anything seriously wrong; and could only be
embarrassed by the consequences of their levity or imprudence.

21. But there is another difference in the woof of a Waverley novel from
the cobweb of a modern one, which depends on Scott's larger view of
human life. Marriage is by no means, in his conception of man and woman,
the most important business of their existence;[48] nor love the only
reward to be proposed to their virtue or exertion. It is not in his
reading of the laws of Providence a necessity that virtue should, either
by love or any other external blessing, be rewarded at all;[49] and
marriage is in all cases thought of as a constituent of the happiness of
life, but not as its only interest, still less its only aim. And upon
analyzing with some care the motives of his principal stories, we shall
often find that the love in them is merely a light by which the sterner
features of character are to be irradiated, and that the marriage of the
hero is as subordinate to the main bent of the story as Henry the
Fifth's courtship of Katherine is to the battle of Agincourt. Nay, the
fortunes of the person who is nominally the subject of the tale are
often little more than a background on which grander figures are to be
drawn, and deeper fates forthshadowed. The judgments between the faith
and chivalry of Scotland at Drumclog and Bothwell Bridge owe little of
their interest in the mind of a sensible reader to the fact that the
captain of the Popinjay is carried a prisoner to one battle, and returns
a prisoner from the other: and Scott himself, while he watches the white
sail that bears Queen Mary for the last time from her native land, very
nearly forgets to finish his novel, or to tell us--and with small sense
of any consolation to be had out of that minor circumstance,--that
"Roland and Catherine were united, spite of their differing faiths."

22. Neither let it be thought for an instant that the slight, and
sometimes scornful, glance with which Scott passes over scenes which a
novelist of our own d