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LETTER LV.

TO THE SAME.

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I KNOW not how many days I might have lingered in the delightful society of Ad, had it not been that I had promised W- to be back in Edinburgh by a particular day at dinner, and I was the less willing to break my engagement, as I understood Mr S was to come to town in the course of a week, so that I should not be compelled to take my final leave of him at his own seat. I quitted, however, with not a little reluctance, the immediate scene of so much pleasure-and the land of so many noble recollections. The morning, too, on which I de

parted, was cold and misty; the vapours seemed unwilling to melt about the hill-tops; and I forded the darkened waters of the Tweed in assuredly a very pensive mood. Muffled in my cloak above the ears, I witnessed rather than directed the motions of the shandrydan, and arrived in Auld Reekie, after a ride of more than thirty miles, almost without having escaped, for a single second, from the same cloud of reverie in which I had begun the journey.

The character of the eminent man whom I had been seeing, and the influence which his writings have produced upon his country, were, as might be supposed, the main ingredients of all my meditation. After having conversed with Mr S, and so become familiar with the features of his countenance, and the tones of his voice, it seemed to me as if I had been furnished with a new key to the whole purpose of his intellectual labours, and was, for the first time, in a situation to look at the life and genius of the man with an eye of knowledge. It is wonderful how the mere seeing of such a person gives concentration, and compactness, and distinctness to one's ideas on all subjects connected with him; I speak for myself to my mind, one of the best

commentaries upon the meaning of any author, is a good image of his face—and, of course, the reality is far more precious than any image can be.

You have often told me that WShas been excelled by several other poets of his time, in regularity and beauty of composition; and so far I have agreed, and do still agree with you. But I think there can be no doubt, that, far more than any other poet, or any other author of his time, he is entitled to claim credit for the extent and importance of the class of ideas to which he has drawn the public attention ; and if it be so, what small matters all his deficiencies or irregularities are, when put in the balance against such praise as this. At a time when the literature of Scotland-and of England too-was becoming every day more and more destitute of command over every thing but the mere speculative understanding of men-this great genius seems to have been raised up to counteract, in the wisest and best of all ways, this unfortunate tendency of his age, by re-awakening the sympathies of his countrymen for the more energetic characters and passions of their forefathers. In so doing he employed, indeed, with the skill

and power of a true master, and a true philosopher, what constitutes the only effectual means of neutralizing that barren spirit of lethargy into which the progress of civilization is in all countries so apt to lull the feelings and imaginations of mankind. The period during which most of his works were produced, was one of mighty struggles and commotions throughout all Europe, and the experience of that eventful period is sufficient to prove, that the greatest political anxieties, and the most important international struggles, can exert little awakening influence upon the character and genius of a people, if the private life of its citizens at home remains limited and monotonous, and confines their personal experience and the range of their thoughts. The rational matter-of-fact way in which all great public concerns are now-a-days carried forward, is sufficient to throw a damp upon the most stirring imagination. Wars are begun and concluded more in reliance upon the strength of money, than on the strength of minds and of men-votes, and supplies, and estimates, and regular business-like dispatches, and daily papers, take away among them the greater part of that magnificent indistinctness, through which, in former times, the great games of warfare and statesmanship used

alike to be regarded by those whose interests were at stake. Very little room is left for enthusiasm, when people are perpetually perplexed in their contemplations of great actions and great men, by the congratulating pettinesses of the well disposed on one side, and the carping meannesses of the envious, and the malevolent, and the littleminded, on the other. The circle within which men's thoughts move, becomes every day a narrower one-and they learn to travel to all their conclusions, not over the free and generous ranges of principle and feeling, but along the plain, hard, dusty high-way of calculation. Now, a poet like Walter Scott, by enquiring into and representing the modes of life in earlier times, employs the imagination of his countrymen, as a means of making them go through the personal experience of their ancestry, and of making them acquainted with the various courses of thought and emotion, by which their forefathers had their genius and characters drawn out-things to which, by the mechanical arrangements of modern life and society, we have been rendered too much strangers. Other poets, such as Byron, have attempted an analogous operation, by carrying us into foreign countries, where society is still comparatively young-but their