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There are certain people whose biographies ought to be long. Who could learn too much concerning Lamb? And concerning Scott, who will not agree with Lockhart’s remark in the preface to his abridged edition of 1848:–“I should have been more willing to produce an enlarged edition; for the interest of Sir Walter’s history lies, I think, peculiarly in its minute details”? You may explore here, and explore there, and still you find pure gold; for the man was gold right through.

So in the present volume every line is of interest because we refer it to Scott’s known character and test it thereby. The result is always the same; yet the employment does not weary. In themselves the letters cannot stand, as mere writing, beside the letters of Cowper, or of Lamb. They are just the common-sense epistles of a man who to his last day remained too modest to believe in the extent of his own genius. The letters in this collection which show most acuteness on literary matters are not Scott’s, but Lady Louisa Stuart’s, who appreciated the Novels on their appearance (their faults as well as their merits) with a judiciousness quite wonderful in a contemporary. Scott’s literary observations (with the exception of one passage where the attitude of an English gentleman towards literature is stated thus–“he asks of it that it shall arouse him from his habitual contempt of what goes on about him”) are much less amusing; and his letters to Joanna Baillie the dullest in the volume, unless it be the answers which Joanna Baillie sent. Best of all, perhaps, is the correspondence (scarcely used by Lockhart) between Scott and Lady Abercorn, with its fitful intervals of warmth and reserve. This alone would justify Mr. Douglas’s volumes. But, indeed, while nothing can be found now to alter men’s conception of Scott, any book about him is justified, even if it do no more than heap up superfluous testimony to the beauty of his character.

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June 15, 1895. A racial disability.

Since about one-third of the number of my particular friends happen to be Scotsmen, it has always distressed and annoyed me that, with the best will in the world, I have never been able to understand on what principle that perfervid race conducts its enthusiasms. Mine is a racial disability, of course; and the converse has been noted by no less a writer than Stevenson, in the story of his journey “Across the Plains”:–

“There were no emigrants direct from Europe–save one German family and a knot of Cornish miners who kept grimly by themselves, one reading the New Testament all day long through steel spectacles, the rest discussing privately the secrets of their old-world mysterious race. Lady Hester Stanhope believed she could make something great of the Cornish; for my part I can make nothing of them at all. A division of races, older and more original than that of Babel, keeps this dose, esoteric family apart from neighbouring Englishmen.”

The loss on my side, to be sure, would be immensely the greater, were it not happily certain that I can make something of Scotsmen; can, and indeed do, make friends of them.

The Cult of Burns.

All the same, this disability weighs me down with a sense of hopeless obtuseness when I consider the deportment of the average intelligent Scot at a Burns banquet, or a Burns conversazione, or a Burns festival, or the unveiling of a Burns statue, or the putting up of a pillar on some spot made famous by Burns. All over the world–and all under it, too, when their time comes–Scotsmen are preparing after-dinner speeches about Burns. The great globe swings round out of the sun into the dark; there is always midnight somewhere; and always in this shifting region the eye of imagination sees orators gesticulating over Burns; companies of heated exiles with crossed arms shouting “Auld Lang Syne”; lesser groups–if haply they be lesser–reposing under tables, still in honor of Burns. And as the vast continents sweep “eastering out of the high shadow which reaches beyond the moon,” and as new nations, with their cities and villages, their mountains and seashores, rise up on the morning-side, lo! fresh troops, and still fresh troops, and yet again fresh troops, wend or are carried out of action with the dawn.