he would have described the Bank of England paying in sixpences, and also the loves of the cashier.”  No one who knows the novels well can question this.  Fergus MacIvor’s ways and means, his careful arrangements for receiving subsidies in black mail, are as carefully recorded as his lavish highland hospitalities; and when he sends his silver cup to the Gaelic bard who chaunts his greatness, the faithful historian does not forget to let us know that the cup is his last, and that he is hard-pressed for the generosities of the future.  So too the habitual thievishness of the highlanders is pressed upon us quite as vividly as their gallantry and superstitions.  And so careful is Sir Walter to paint the petty pedantries of the Scotch traditional conservatism, that he will not spare even Charles Edward—­of whom he draws so graceful a picture—­the humiliation of submitting to old Bradwardine’s “solemn act of homage,” but makes him go through the absurd ceremony of placing his foot on a cushion to have its brogue unlatched by the dry old enthusiast of heraldic lore.  Indeed it was because Scott so much enjoyed the contrast between the high sentiment of life and its dry and often absurd detail, that his imagination found so much freer a vent in the historical romance, than it ever found in the romantic poem.  Yet he clearly needed the romantic excitement of picturesque scenes and historical interests, too.  I do not think he would ever have gained any brilliant success in the narrower region of the domestic novel.  He said himself, in expressing his admiration of Miss Austen, “The big bow-wow strain I can do myself, like any now going, but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and the sentiment, is denied to me.”  Indeed he tried it to some extent in St. Ronan’s Well, and so far as he tried it, I think he failed.  Scott needed a certain largeness of type, a strongly-marked class-life, and, where it was possible, a free, out-of-doors life, for his delineations. No one could paint beggars and gipsies, and wandering fiddlers, and mercenary soldiers, and peasants and farmers and lawyers, and magistrates, and preachers, and courtiers, and statesmen, and best of all perhaps queens and kings, with anything like his ability.  But when it came to describing the small differences of manner, differences not due to external habits, so much as to internal sentiment or education, or mere domestic circumstance, he was beyond his proper field.  In the sketch of the St. Ronan’s Spa and the company at the table-d’hote, he is of course somewhere near the mark,—­he was too able a man to fall far short of success in anything he really gave to the world; but it is not interesting.  Miss Austen would have made Lady Penelope Penfeather a hundred times as amusing.  We turn to Meg Dods and Touchwood, and Cargill, and Captain Jekyl, and Sir Bingo Binks, and to Clara Mowbray,—­i.