If public opinion is far different to-day from what it was in Scott’s time in reference to his poetry, we observe the same change in regard to the source of his widest fame, his novels,—­but not to so marked a degree, for it was in fiction that Scott’s great gifts had their full fruition.  Many a fine intellect still delights in his novels, though cultivated readers and critics differ as to their comparative merits.  No two persons will unite in their opinions as to the three of those productions which they like most or least.  It is so with all famous novels.  Then, too, what man of seventy will agree with a man of thirty as to the comparative merits of Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, George Eliot, Eugene Sue, Victor Hugo, Balzac, George Sand?  How few read “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” compared with the multitudes who read that most powerful and popular book forty years ago?  How changing, if not transient, is the fame of the novelist as well as of the poet!  With reference to him even the same generation changes its tastes.  What filled us with delight as young men or women of twenty, is at fifty spurned with contempt or thrown aside with indifference.  No books ever filled my mind and soul with the delight I had when, at twelve years of age, I read “The Children of the Abbey” and “Thaddeus of Warsaw,” What man of eighty can forget the enthusiasm with which he read “Old Mortality” or “Ivanhoe” when he was in college?

Perhaps one test of a great book is the pleasure derived from reading it over and over again,—­as we read “Don Quixote,” or the dramas of Shakspeare, of whose infinite variety we never tire.  Measured by this test, the novels of Sir Walter Scott are among the foremost works of fiction which have appeared in our world.  They will not all retain their popularity from generation to generation, like “Don Quixote” or “The Pilgrim’s Progress” or “The Vicar of Wakefield;” but these are single productions of their authors, while not a few of Scott’s many novels are certainly still read by cultivated people,—­if not with the same interest they excited when first published, yet with profit and admiration.  They have some excellencies which are immortal,—­elevation of sentiment, chivalrous regard for women, fascination of narrative (after one has waded through the learned historical introductory chapters), the absence of exaggeration, the vast variety of characters introduced and vividly maintained, and above all the freshness and originality of description, both of Nature and of man.  Among the severest and most bigoted of New England Puritans, none could find anything corrupting or demoralizing in his romances; whereas Byron and Bulwer were never mentioned without a shudder, and even Shakspeare was locked up in book-cases as unfit for young people to read, and not particularly creditable for anybody to own.  The unfavorable comments which the most orthodox ever made upon Scott were as to the repulsiveness of the old Covenanters, as he described them, and his sneers at Puritan perfections.  Scott, however, had contempt, not for the Puritans, but for many of their peculiarities,—­especially for their cant when it degenerated into hypocrisy.