moralist, and one, moreover, the type of whose conventional code was borrowed more from that of honour than from that of religious principle.  There is one curious passage in his diary, written very near the end of his life, in which Scott even seems to declare that conventional standards of conduct are better, or at least safer, than religious standards of conduct.  He says in his diary for the 15th April, 1828,—­“Dined with Sir Robert Inglis, and met Sir Thomas Acland, my old and kind friend.  I was happy to see him.  He may be considered now as the head of the religious party in the House of Commons—­a powerful body which Wilberforce long commanded.  It is a difficult situation, for the adaptation of religious motives to earthly policy is apt—­among the infinite delusions of the human heart—­to be a snare."[37] His letters to his eldest son, the young cavalry officer, on his first start in life, are much admired by Mr. Lockhart, but to me they read a little hard, a little worldly, and extremely conventional.  Conventionality was certainly to his mind almost a virtue.

Of enthusiasm in religion Scott always spoke very severely; both in his novels and in his letters and private diary.  In writing to Lord Montague, he speaks of such enthusiasm as was then prevalent at Oxford, and which makes, he says, “religion a motive and a pretext for particular lines of thinking in politics and in temporal affairs” [as if it could help doing that!] as “teaching a new way of going to the devil for God’s sake,” and this expressly, because when the young are infected with it, it disunites families, and sets “children in opposition to their parents."[38] He gives us, however, one reason for his dread of anything like enthusiasm, which is not conventional;—­that it interferes with the submissive and tranquil mood which is the only true religious mood.  Speaking in his diary of a weakness and fluttering at the heart, from which he had suffered, he says, “It is an awful sensation, and would have made an enthusiast of me, had I indulged my imagination on religious subjects.  I have been always careful to place my mind in the most tranquil posture which it can assume, during my private exercises of devotion."[39] And in this avoidance of indulging the imagination on religious, or even spiritual subjects, Scott goes far beyond Shakespeare.  I do not think there is a single study in all his romances of what may be fairly called a pre-eminently spiritual character as such, though Jeanie Deans approaches nearest to it.  The same may be said of Shakespeare.  But Shakespeare, though he has never drawn a pre-eminently spiritual character, often enough indulged his imagination while meditating on spiritual themes.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 36:  Lockhart’s Life of Scott, iii. 198-9.]

[Footnote 37:  Lockhart’s Life of Scott, ix. 231.]

[Footnote 38:  Ibid., vii. 255-6.]