reign, or as Mr. Trollope describes the politicians and hunting-men of Queen Victoria’s, it is nevertheless the evidence of a greater imagination to make us live so familiarly as Scott does amidst the political and religious controversies of two or three centuries’ duration, to be the actual witnesses, as it were, of Margaret of Anjou’s throes of vain ambition, and Mary Stuart’s fascinating remorse, and Elizabeth’s domineering and jealous balancings of noble against noble, of James the First’s shrewd pedantries, and the Regent Murray’s large forethought, of the politic craft of Argyle, the courtly ruthlessness of Claverhouse, and the high-bred clemency of Monmouth, than to reflect in countless modifications the freaks, figures, and fashions of our own time.

The most striking feature of Scott’s romances is that, for the most part, they are pivoted on public rather than mere private interests and passions.  With but few exceptions—­(The Antiquary, St. Ronan’s Well, and Guy Mannering are the most important)—­Scott’s novels give us an imaginative view, not of mere individuals, but of individuals as they are affected by the public strifes and social divisions of the age.  And this it is which gives his books so large an interest for old and young, soldiers and statesmen, the world of society and the recluse, alike.  You can hardly read any novel of Scott’s and not become better aware what public life and political issues mean.  And yet there is no artificiality, no elaborate attitudinizing before the antique mirrors of the past, like Bulwer’s, no dressing out of clothes-horses like G. P. R. James.  The boldness and freshness of the present are carried back into the past, and you see Papists and Puritans, Cavaliers and Roundheads, Jews, Jacobites, and freebooters, preachers, schoolmasters, mercenary soldiers, gipsies, and beggars, all living the sort of life which the reader feels that in their circumstances and under the same conditions of time and place and parentage, he might have lived too.  Indeed, no man can read Scott without being more of a public man, whereas the ordinary novel tends to make its readers rather less of one than before.

Next, though most of these stories are rightly called romances, no one can avoid observing that they give that side of life which is unromantic, quite as vigorously as the romantic side.  This was not true of Scott’s poems, which only expressed one-half of his nature, and were almost pure romances.  But in the novels the business of life is even better portrayed than its sentiments.  Mr. Bagehot, one of the ablest of Scott’s critics, has pointed out this admirably in his essay on The Waverley Novels.  “Many historical novelists,” he says, “especially those who with care and pains have read up the detail, are often evidently in a strait how to pass from their history to their sentiment.  The fancy of Sir Walter could not help connecting the two.  If he had given us the English side of the race to Derby,