vision of himself, as swaggering and sentimental as a penny novelette.  The literature of candour unearths innumerable weaknesses and elements of lawlessness which is called romance.  It perceives superficial habits like murder and dipsomania, but it does not perceive the deepest of sins—­the sin of vanity—­vanity which is the mother of all day-dreams and adventures, the one sin that is not shared with any boon companion, or whispered to any priest.

In estimating, therefore, the ground of Scott’s pre-eminence in romance we must absolutely rid ourselves of the notion that romance or adventure are merely materialistic things involved in the tangle of a plot or the multiplicity of drawn swords.  We must remember that it is, like tragedy or farce, a state of the soul, and that, for some dark and elemental reason which we can never understand, this state of the soul is evoked in us by the sight of certain places or the contemplation of certain human crises, by a stream rushing under a heavy and covered wooden bridge, or by a man plunging a knife or sword into tough timber.  In the selection of these situations which catch the spirit of romance as in a net, Scott has never been equalled or even approached.  His finest scenes affect us like fragments of a hilarious dream.  They have the same quality which is often possessed by those nocturnal comedies—­that of seeming more human than our waking life—­even while they are less possible.  Sir Arthur Wardour, with his daughter and the old beggar crouching in a cranny of the cliff as night falls and the tide closes around them, are actually in the coldest and bitterest of practical situations.  Yet the whole incident has a quality that can only be called boyish.  It is warmed with all the colours of an incredible sunset.  Rob Roy trapped in the Tolbooth, and confronted with Bailie Nicol Jarvie, draws no sword, leaps from no window, affects none of the dazzling external acts upon which contemporary romance depends, yet that plain and humorous dialogue is full of the essential philosophy of romance which is an almost equal betting upon man and destiny.  Perhaps the most profoundly thrilling of all Scott’s situations is that in which the family of Colonel Mannering are waiting for the carriage which may or may not arrive by night to bring an unknown man into a princely possession.  Yet almost the whole of that thrilling scene consists of a ridiculous conversation about food, and flirtation between a frivolous old lawyer and a fashionable girl.  We can say nothing about what makes these scenes, except that the wind bloweth where it listeth, and that here the wind blows strong.