delineation in character, graphic details of the olden time, which are chiefly to be admired. Who can read without transport his glowing descriptions of the age of chivalry? Its massy castles and gloomy vaults, its haughty nobles and beauteous dames, its gorgeous pageantry and prancing steeds stand forth under his magic pencil with all the colors and brilliancy of reality. We are present at the shock of armies, we hear the shouts of mortal combatants, we see the flames of burning castles, we weep in the dungeon of captive innocence. Yet who has so well and truly delineated the less obtrusive but not less impressive scenes of humble life? Who has so faithfully portrayed the virtues of the cottage; who has done so much to elevate human nature by exhibiting its dignity even in the abyss of misfortune; who has felt so truly and told so well "the might that slumbers in a peasant arm? In Byron it is the fierce contest of the passions-the yearning of a soul longing for the stern realities of life amidst the seduction of its frivolity; the brilliant conceptions of a mind fraught with the imagery and recollections of the East-which chiefly captivates every mind. His pencil is literally "dipped in the orient hues of heaven." He transports us to enchanted ground, where the scenes which speak most powerfully to the heart of man are brought successively before our eyes. The East, with its deathless scenes and cloudless skies, its wooded steeps and mouldering fanes, its glassy seas and lovely vales, rises up like magic before us. The haughty and yet impassioned Turk, the crouching but still gifted Greek, the wandering Arab, the cruel Tartar, the fanatic Moslem, stand before us like living beings, they are clothed with flesh and blood. - ALISON: Miscellaneous EssaysScott, Campbell, and Byron. If Byron and Scott could have been combined-if the energetic passions of the one could have been joined to the healthy nature and quick sympathies of the other-we might have seen another Shakespeare in the nineteenth century. LESLIE STEPHEN. HAZLITT'S COMPARISON OF SCOTT AND SHAKESPEARE. Just such, I apprehend, generally speaking, is the amount of difference between the genius of Shakspeare and that of Sir Walter Scott. It is the difference between original. ity and the want of it, between writing and transcribing. Almost all the finest scenes and touches, the great masterstrokes, in Shakspeare are such as must have belonged to the class of invention, where the secret lay between him and his own heart, and the power exerted is in adding to the given materials and working something out of them; in the Author of "Waverley," not all, but the principal and characteristic beauties are such as may and do belong to the class of compilation-that is, consist in bringing the materials together, and leaving them to produce their own effect.... We begin to measure Shakspeare's height from the superstructure of passion and fancy he has raised out of his subject and story, on which, too, rests the triumphal arch of his fame; if we were to take away the subject and story, the portrait and history, from the Scotch novels, no great deal would be left worth talking about. No one admires or delights in the Scotch novels more than I do; but at the same time, when I hear it asserted that his mind is of the same class with Shakspeare's, or that he imitates nature in the same way, I confess I cannot assent to it. No two things appear to me more different. Sir Walter is an imitator of nature, and nothing more; but I think Shakspeare is infinitely more than this. The creative principle is everywhere restless and redundant in Shakspeare, both as it relates to the invention of feeling and imagery; in the Author of "Waverley" it lies, for the most part, dormant, sluggish, and unused. Sir Walter's mind is full of information, but the "o'er-informing power is not there. Shakspeare's spirit, like fire, shines through him; Sir Walter's, like a stream, reflects surrounding objects. ... " Shakspeare produces his most striking dramatic effects out of the workings of the finest and most intense passions; Sir Walter places his dramatis persona in romantic situations, and subjects them to extraordinary occurrences and narrates the results. The one gives us what we see and hear, the other what we are. Hamlet is not a person whose nativity is cast or whose death is foretold by portents; he weaves the web of his destiny out of his own thoughts, and a very quaint and singular one it is. We have, I think, a stronger fellow-feeling with him than we have with Bertram or Waverley. All men feel and think more or less; but we are not all foundlings, Jacobites, or astrologers. We might have been overturned with these gentlemen in a stage-coach; we seem to have been schoolfellows with Hamlet at Wittenberg. I will not press this argument further lest I should make it tedious, and run into questions I have no intention to meddle with. All I mean to insist upon is that Sir Walter's forte is in the richness and variety of his materials, and Shakspeare's in the working them up. Sir Walter is distinguished by the most amazing retentiveness of memory, and vividness of conception of what would happen, be seen, and felt by everybody in given circumstances, as Shakspeare is by inventiveness of genius, by a faculty of tracing and unfolding the most hidden yet powerful springs of action, scarcely recognized by ourselves, and by an endless and felicitous range of poetical illustration, added to a wide scope of reading and of knowledge.-Table Talk. WHAT SIR WALTER SCOTT DID FOR SCOTLAND. The great thing Scott did was to unfold a new country, a new world, to his contemporaries. We ourselves, calm in all the unconscious gain which his existence and work has added to the general inheritance, can scarcely realize to ourselves what it would be to Scotland to sweep Scott out of her. It is a thing, thank Heaven! which no calamity can do; but if it could be done, what an impoverished country would be left behind! This has been one of the unhappy particulars in the fate of Ireland, with which misgovernment has had nothing to do: she has had no Burns and no Scott. Her beautiful scenery has never been populated with noble and gentle human beings claiming the interest of the world. Her genius has wasted itself in wild verses, in the records of wild pranks and jokes. No great magician has made her shores familiar, not to Englishmen only, but to mankind; no poet of the highest order has sung her cabins and her fields. If the genius was there, it has been wasted and never come to fruit. Miss Edgeworth, it is true, made a beginning of this noblest of all works, and seemed for a moment likely to open a way by which the Irish heart might have been known; but she was not strong enough for the mission, and was soon led away from it to the moralities of the school-room and the complications of fashionable life. When Scott found his neglected manuscript (of "Waverley") in the drawer of the cabinet where he was seeking his fishingtackle, Scotland was less interesting than Ireland to the general mind, and equally unknown. The ordinary Englishman's idea of the Scot had scarcely changed since the time when the first Stuart came to the throne, and his beggarly and grasping followers became the proverb of the ignorant but wealthy Southerners, who saw in them nothing but a race of harpies and parasites. Such was the idea which Johnson entertained and expressed with a vigor which no courtesy veiled. Jokes about a supposed national disease, and sneers concerning the inalienable caution and craft, thrift and penury, of the race were all that was ever heard of the people; and the country was less known than America, or even Japan, is now. Macpherson in Ossian (false or true, the cause of so many controversies) had given a wild, fictitious picture of unearthly wastes and mists, cloudy mountains and cruel seas, all melancholy, tragic, monstrous, and incomprehensible, in which the French and other foreign critics found a sentiment thoroughly appropriate to the mystic North, but which the English mind, with much unanimity, rejected as entirely out of its range, and not much worth investigating. When Burns raised his voice from the heart of this unknown land there had been a thrill of excited attention and wonder; but Burns was so great a prodigy in every way, and everything about him was so beyond expectation, that his nationality added only a surprise the more to the standing wonder of his existence at all. And that existence was so brief that the public mind had scarcely time to get over the shock of his appearance in his ploughman guise and peasant language, compelling its attention, and to inquire what manner of race it was which produced such a miracle, when the wonderful rustic disappeared and all was still again. When Scott, in his turn, presented himself with the fine ballad strain of his poems, bringing back the moss-trooper and the Border knight, the old, picturesque, chivalrous court of the Jameses, generous, romantic monarchs of a land of romance, the glowing tartans and tragic passion, not wholly above melodrama, of the Highland chieftains, the imagination of the tourist began to be fired -if, indeed, that modern development of man was not created altogether by this new revelation; but still the revelation was very partial. When, however, the first novel of the Waverley series came into the world, the curtain rose, as in a theatre, upon Scotland, no longer a rugged North, a conventional country known by certain moral (or immoral) qualities, but for the moment the most distinct and clearly evident of all the quarters of the earth, the chosen land of all that was humorous and all that was pathetic, full of an unsuspected and inexhaustible variety of character and wealth of emotion. The veil was drawn from her face, not only to other nations, but even to her own astonished and delighted inhabitants, who had hitherto despised or derided the Highland caterans, but now beheld silently, with amazed eyes, the real features of their uncomprehended countrymen, just as England and the more distant world awoke to know the "land of the mountain and the flood." Among the agencies that have made Scotland, once so rude and poor, the most prosperous of countries, it is injustice indeed to exclude this one-the warm and tender and living portraiture of her characteristic features, which first made her the acquaintance, the |