Scott has been censured as being wilfully unjust to the Covenanters and Puritans.  I think he meant really to deal fairly by them, and that what he called fairness might seem rank injustice to those brought up to venerate them, as we have been.  I suppose that in Old Mortality it was Scott’s honest intention to balance the two parties about fairly, by putting on the Covenant side his good, steady, well-behaved hero, Mr. Morton, who is just as much of a Puritan as the Puritans would have been had they taken Sir Walter Scott’s advice; that is to say, a very nice, sensible, moral man, who takes the Puritan side because he thinks it the right side, but contemplates all the devotional enthusiasm and religious ecstasies of his associates from a merely artistic and pictorial point of view.  The trouble was, when he got his model Puritan done, nobody ever knew what he was meant for; and then all the young ladies voted steady Henry Morton a bore, and went to falling in love with his Cavalier rival, Lord Evandale, and people talked as if it was a preconcerted arrangement of Scott, to surprise the female heart, and carry it over to the royalist side.

The fact was, in describing Evandale he made a living, effective character, because he was describing something he had full sympathy with, and put his whole life into; but Henry Morton is a laborious arrangement of starch and pasteboard to produce one of those supposititious, just-right men, who are always the stupidest of mortals after they are made.  As to why Scott did not describe such a character as the martyr Duke of Argyle, or Hampden, or Sir Harry Vane, where high birth, and noble breeding, and chivalrous sentiment were all united with intense devotional fervor, the answer is, that he could not do it; he had not that in him wherewith to do it; a man cannot create that of which he has not first had the elements in himself; and devotional enthusiasm is a thing which Scott never felt.  Nevertheless, I believe that he was perfectly sincere in saying that he would, “if necessary, die a martyr for Christianity.”  He had calm, firm principle to any extent, but it never was kindled into fervor.  He was of too calm and happy a temperament to sound the deepest recesses of souls torn up from their depths by mighty conflicts and sorrows.  There are souls like the “alabaster vase of ointment, very precious,” which shed no perfume of devotion because a great sorrow has never broken them.  Could Scott have been given back to the world again after the heavy discipline of life had passed over him, he would have spoken otherwise of many things.  What he vainly struggled to say to Lockhart on his death bed would have been a new revelation, of his soul to the world, could he have lived to unfold it in literature.  But so it is:  when we have learned to live, life’s purpose is answered, and we die!