They had not to compare him with the melancholy mirth of Thackeray, and the charm, the magic of his style.

Balzac was of the future; of the future was the Scott of France,--the boyish, the witty, the rapid, the brilliant, the inexhaustible Dumas.

Scott's generation had no scruples abort "realism," listened to no sermons on the glory of the commonplace; like Dr.Johnson, they admired a book which "was amusing as a fairy-tale." But we are overwhelmed with a wealth of comparisons, and deafened by a multitude of homilies on fiction, and distracted, like the people in the Erybyggja Saga, by the strange rising and setting, and the wild orbits of new "weirdmoons" of romance.

Before we can make up our minds on Scott, we have to remember, or forget, the scornful patronage of one critic, the over-subtlety and exaggerations of another, the more than papal infallibility of a third.

Perhaps the best critic would be an intelligent school-boy, with a generous heart and an unspoiled imagination.