e. to the lives really moulded by large and specific causes, for enjoyment, and leave the small gossip of the company at the Wells as, relatively at least, a failure.  And it is well for all the world that it was so.  The domestic novel, when really of the highest kind, is no doubt a perfect work of art, and an unfailing source of amusement; but it has nothing of the tonic influence, the large instructiveness, the stimulating intellectual air, of Scott’s historic tales.  Even when Scott is farthest from reality—­as in Ivanhoe or The Monastery—­he makes you open your eyes to all sorts of historical conditions to which you would otherwise be blind.  The domestic novel, even when its art is perfect, gives little but pleasure at the best; at the worst it is simply scandal idealized.

Scott often confessed his contempt for his own heroes.  He said of Edward Waverley, for instance, that he was “a sneaking piece of imbecility,” and that “if he had married Flora, she would have set him up upon the chimney-piece as Count Borowlaski’s wife used to do with him.  I am a bad hand at depicting a hero, properly so called, and have an unfortunate propensity for the dubious characters of borderers, buccaneers, highland robbers, and all others of a Robin-Hood description."[33] In another letter he says, “My rogue always, in despite of me, turns out my hero."[34] And it seems very likely that in most of the situations Scott describes so well, his own course would have been that of his wilder impulses, and not that of his reason.  Assuredly he would never have stopped hesitating on the line between opposite courses as his Waverleys, his Mortons, his Osbaldistones do.  Whenever he was really involved in a party strife, he flung prudence and impartiality to the winds, and went in like the hearty partisan which his strong impulses made of him.  But granting this, I do not agree with his condemnation of all his own colourless heroes.  However much they differed in nature from Scott himself, the even balance of their reason against their sympathies is certainly well conceived, is in itself natural, and is an admirable expedient for effecting that which was probably its real use to Scott,—­the affording an opportunity for the delineation of all the pros and cons of the case, so that the characters on both sides of the struggle should be properly understood.  Scott’s imagination was clearly far wider—­was far more permeated with the fixed air of sound judgment—­than his practical impulses.  He needed a machinery for displaying his insight into both sides of a public quarrel, and his colourless heroes gave him the instrument he needed.  Both in Morton’s case (in Old Mortality), and in Waverley’s, the hesitation is certainly well described.  Indeed in relation to the controversy between Covenanters and Royalists, while his political and martial prepossessions went with Claverhouse, his reason and educated moral feeling certainly were clearly identified with Morton.