a second Homer to do them justice. Godfrey
the perfect soldier and leader, Bohemund the
unscrupulous and formidable, Tancred the ideal
knight errant, Robert of Normandy the half-mad
hero! Here is material so rich that one
feels one is not worthy to handle it. What
richest imagination could ever evolve anything
more marvellous and thrilling than the actual
historical facts?

  But what a glorious brotherhood the novels
are! Think of the pure romance of ``The
Talisman''; the exquisite picture of Hebridean
life in ``The Pirate''; the splendid reproduction
of Elizabethan England in ``Kenilworth'';
the rich humour of the ``Legend of Montrose';
above all, bear in mind that in all that splendid
series, written in a coarse age, there is not one
word to offend the most sensitive car, and it is
borne in upon one how great and noble a man
was Walter Scott, and how high the service
which he did for literature and for humanity.

  For that reason his life is good reading, and
there it is on the same shelf as the novels. 
Lockhart was, of course, his son-in-law and his
admiring friend. The ideal biographer should
be a perfectly impartial man, with a sympathetic
mind, but a stern determination to tell the absolute
truth. One would like the frail, human
side of a man as well as the other. I cannot
believe that anyone in the world was ever quite
so good as the subject of most of our biographies. 
Surely these worthy people swore a little sometimes,
or had a keen eye for a pretty face, or
opened the second bottle when they would have
done better to stop at the first, or did something
to make us feel that they were men and brothers. 
They need not go the length of the lady who
began a biography of her deceased husband
with the words---``D------ was a dirty man,''
but the books certainly would be more readable,
and the subjects more lovable too, if we had
greater light and shade in the picture.

  But I am sure that the more one knew of Scott
the more one would have admired him. He
lived in a drinking age, and in a drinking country,
and I have not a doubt that he took an
allowance of toddy occasionally of an evening
which would have laid his feeble successors
under the table. His last years, at least, poor
fellow, were abstemious enough, when he sipped
his barley-water, while the others passed the
decanter. But what a high-souled chivalrous
gentleman he was, with how fine a sense of
honour, translating itself not into empty phrases,
but into years of labour and denial! You remember
how he became sleeping partner in a
printing house, and so involved himself in its
failure. There was a legal, but very little moral,
claim against him, and no one could have blamed
him had he cleared the account by a bankruptcy,
which would have enabled him to become a rich
man again within a few years. Yet he took the
whole burden upon himself and bore it for the
rest of his life, spending his work, his time, and
his health in the one long effort to save his
honour from the shadow of a stain. It was
nearly a hundred thousand pounds, I think,
which he passed on to the creditors---a great
record, a hundred thousand pounds, with his
life thrown in.

  And what a power of work he had! It was
superhuman. Only the man who has tried to
write fiction himself knows what it means when
it is recorded that Scott produced two of his
long novels in one single year. I remember
reading in some book of reminiscences---on
second thoughts it was in Lockhart himself---
how the writer had lodged in some rooms in
Castle Street, Edinburgh, and how he had seen
all evening the silhouette of a man outlined on
the blind of the opposite house. All evening
the man wrote, and the observer could see the
shadow hand conveying the sheets of paper from
the desk to the pile at the side. He went to
a party and returned, but still the hand was
moving the sheets. Next morning he was told
that the rooms opposite were occupied by
Walter Scott.

  A curious glimpse into the psychology of the
writer of fiction is shown by the fact that he
wrote two of his books---good ones, too---at a
time when his health was such that he could
not afterwards remember one word of them,
and listened to them when they were read to
him as if he were hearing the work of another