This generous universality of taste, in addition to all his other qualities of humour and poetry, enabled Scott to raise the novel from its decadence, and to make the dry bones of history live again in his tales.

With Charles Edward at Holyrood, as Mr.Senior wrote in the "Quarterly Review," "we are in the lofty region of romance.

In any other hands than those of Sir Walter Scott, the language and conduct of those great people would have been as dignified as their situations.

We should have heard nothing of the hero in his new costume 'majoring afore the muckle pier-glass,' of his arrest by the hint of the Candlestick, of his examination by the well-powdered Major Melville, or of his fears of being informed against by Mrs.Nosebag." In short, "while the leading persons and events are as remote from ordinary life as the inventions of Scudery, the picture of human nature is as faithful as could have been given by Fielding or Le Sage." Though this criticism has not the advantage of being new, it is true; and when we have added that Scott's novels are the novels of the poet who, next to Shakspeare, knew mankind most widely and well, we have the secret of his triumph.
For the first time in literature, it was a poet who held the pen of the romancer in prose.

Fielding, Richardson, De Foe, Miss Rurnev, were none of them made by the gods poetical.