over 18 years in all, commencing with the year 1814.  This was the year of the publication of “Waverley,” which was followed by that of “Guy Mannering,” “The Antiquary,” “Rob Roy,” “Old Mortality,” and “The Heart of Midlothian” in the year 1819, when he was smitten down by an illness, the effects of which was seen in his after-work.  “The Bride of Lammermoor,” “Ivanhoe,” “The Monastery,” “The Abbot,” “Kenilworth,” and “The Pirate” belong to the years that succeeded that illness, and all more or less witness to its sorrowful effects, of which last “The Abbot” and “The Monastery” are reckoned the best, as still illustrating the “essential powers” of Scott, to which may be added “Redgauntlet” and “The Fortunes of Nigel,” characterised by Ruskin as “quite noble ones,” together with “Quentin Durward” and “Woodstock,” as “both of high value.”  Sir Walter’s own life was, in its inner essence, an even-flowing one, for there were in it no crises such as to require a reversal of the poles of it, and a spiritual new birth, with crucifixion of the old nature, and hence it is easily divisible, as it has been divided throughout, into the three natural periods of growth, activity, and death.  His active life, which ranges from 1796 to 1826, lay in picturing things and traditions of things as in youth, a 25 years’ period of continuous crescent expansiveness, he had learned to view them, and his slow death was the result, not of mere weariness in working, but of the adverse circumstances that thwarted and finally wrecked the one unworthy ambition that had fatally taken possession of his heart.  Of Scott Ruskin says, “What good Scott had in him to do, I find no words full enough to express...  Scott is beyond comparison the greatest intellectual force manifested in Europe since Shakespeare...  All Scott’s great writings were the recreations of a mind confirmed in dutiful labour, and rich with organic gathering of boundless resource” (1771-1832).

SCOTT, WILLIAM BELL, painter and poet, brother of David Scott, born in Edinburgh; did criticism and wrote on artists; is best known by his autobiography (1811-1890).

SCRANTON (102), capital of Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, on the Lackawanna River, 144 m.  NW. of New York; does a large trade in coal, and is the centre of a busy steel, iron, and machinery industry.

SCRIBE, EUGENE, French dramatist, a prolific and a successful, who produced plays for half a century, well adapted for the stage, if otherwise worthless (1791-1861).

SCRIBES, THE (i. e. writers), a non-priestly class among the Jews devoted to the study and exposition of the Law, and who rose to a position of importance and influence in the Jewish community, were known in the days of Christ also by the name of Lawyers, and were addressed as Rabbis; their disciples were taught to regard them, and did regard them with a reverence superior to that paid to father or mother, the spiritual parent being reckoned as much above the natural, as the spirit and its interests are above the flesh and its interests.