picture, we
should hardly have conceived ever to have passed through Scott's
happier mind.[52] All the bitter blasphemy of spirit which, from
infancy to the tomb, swelled up in Byron against the unkindness of
nature; which sometimes perverted even his filial love into a
sentiment of diabolical malignity; all this black and desolate train
of reflections must have been encountered and deliberately subdued by
the manly parent of The Black Dwarf. Old Mortality, on the other hand,
is remarkable as the _novelist's_ first attempt to repeople the past
by the power of imagination working on materials furnished by books.
In Waverley he revived the fervid dreams of his boyhood, and drew, not
from printed records, but from the artless oral narratives of his
_Invernahyles_. In Guy Mannering and The Antiquary he embodied
characters and manners familiar {p.131} to his own wandering youth.
But whenever his letters mention Old Mortality in its progress, they
represent him as strong in the confidence that the industry with which
he had pored over a library of forgotten tracts would enable him to
identify himself with the time in which they had birth, as completely
as if he had listened with his own ears to the dismal sermons of
Peden, ridden with Claverhouse and Dalzell in the rout of Bothwell,
and been an advocate at the bar of the Privy Council, when Lauderdale
catechised and tortured the assassins of Archbishop Sharp. To
reproduce a departed age with such minute and lifelike accuracy as
this tale exhibits, demanded a far more energetic sympathy of
imagination than had been called for in any effort of his serious
verse. It is indeed most curiously instructive for any student of art
to compare the Roundheads of Rokeby with the Bluebonnets of Old
Mortality. For the rest--the story is framed with a deeper skill than
any of the preceding novels: the canvas is a broader one; the
characters are contrasted and projected with a power and felicity
which neither he nor any other master ever surpassed; and,
notwithstanding all that has been urged against him as a disparager of
the Covenanters, it is to me very doubtful whether the inspiration of
romantic chivalry ever prompted him to nobler emotions than he has
lavished on the re-animation of their stern and solemn enthusiasm.
This work has always appeared to me the Marmion of his novels.[53]

[Footnote 52: [On reading _The Black Dwarf_, Mrs. Leigh
believed her brothe