and lets them tell their own story, as best they may. The facts are stubborn in the last instance as the men are in the first, and in neither case is the broth spoiled by the cook. This abstinence from interfering with their resources, lest they should defeat their own success, shows great modesty and self-knowledge in the compiler of romances and the leader of armies, but little boldness or inventiveness of genius. We begin to measure Shakespeare'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 Shakespeare'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 Shakespeare is infinitely more than this. The creative principle is everywhere restless and redundant in Shakespeare, 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'erinforming power" is not there. Shakespeare's spirit, like fire, shines through him: Sir Walter's, like a stream, reflects surrounding objects. It is true he has shifted the scene from Scotland into England and France, and the manners and characters are strikingly English and French; but this does not prove that they are not local, and that they are not borrowed, as well as the scenery and the costume, from comparatively obvious and mechanical sources. Nobody from reading Shakespeare would know (except from the dramatis persona) that Lear was an English king. He is merely a king and a father. The ground is common: but what a well of tears has he dug out of it! The tradition is nothing, or a foolish one. There are no data in history to go upon; no advantage is taken of costume, no acquaintance with geography or architecture or dialect is necessary: but

there is an old tradition, human nature-an old temple, the human mind-and Shakespeare walks into it and looks about him with a lordly eye, and seizes on the sacred spoils as his own. The story is a thousand or two years old, and yet the tragedy has no smack of antiquarianism in it. I should like very well to see Sir Walter giving us a tragedy of this kind, a huge "globose" of sorrow, swinging round in mid-air, independent of time, place, or circumstance, sustained by its own weight and motion, and not propped up by the levers of custom, or patched up with quaint, old-fashioned dresses, or set off by grotesque backgrounds or rusty armor, but in which the mere paraphernalia and accessories were left out of the question, and nothing but the soul of passion and the pith of imagination was to be found. "A dukedom to a beggarly denier," he would make nothing of it. Does this prove he has done nothing, or that he had not done the greatest things? No, but that he is not like Shakespeare. For instance, when Lear says, "The little dogs and all, Tray, Blanche, and Sweetheart, see they bark at me!" 4 there is no old chronicle of the line of Brute, no blackletter broadside, no tattered ballad, no vague rumor, in which this exclamation is registered; there is nothing romantic, quaint, mysterious in the objects introduced: the illustration is borrowed from the commonest and most casual images in nature, and yet it is this very circumstance that lends its extreme force to the expression of his grief by showing that even the lowest things in creation, and the last you would think of, had in his imagination turned against him. All nature was, as he supposed, in a conspiracy against him, and the most trivial and insignificant creatures concerned in it were the most striking proofs of its malignity and extent. It is the depth of passion, however, or of the poet's sympathy with it, that distinguished this character of torturing familiarity in them, invests them with corresponding importance, and suggests them by the force of contrast. It is not that certain images are surcharged with a prescriptive influence over the imagination from known and existing prejudices, so that to approach or even men

King Lear, III, vi, 65. Compare page 226.

tion them is sure to excite a pleasing awe and horror in the mind (the effect in this case is mostly mechanical), the whole sublimity of the passage is from the weight of passion thrown into it, and this is the poet's own doing. This is not trick, but genius. Meg Mirrilies on her death-bed says, "Lay my head to the East!" 5 Nothing can be finer or more thrilling than this in its way; but the author has little to do with it. It is an Oriental superstition; it is a proverbial expression; it is part of the gibberish (sublime though it be) of her gypsy clan! "Nothing but his unkind daughters could have brought him to this pass." "" 6 This is not a cant phrase, nor the fragment of an old legend, nor a mysterious spell, nor the butt-end of a wizard's denunciation. It is the mere natural ebullition of passion, urged nearly to madness, and that will admit no other cause of dire misfortune but its own, which swallows up all other griefs. The force of despair hurries the imagination over the boundary of fact and common sense, and renders the transition sublime; but there is no precedent or authority for it, except in the general nature of the human mind. I think, but am not sure, that Sir Walter Scott has imitated this turn of reflection, by making Madge Wildfire ascribe Jenny Deans's uneasiness to the loss of her baby, which had unsettled her brain. Again, Lear calls on the Heavens to take his part, for "they are old like him." 8 Here there is nothing to prop up the image but the strength of passion, confounding the infirmity of age with the stability of the firmament, and equaling the complainant, through the sense of suffering and wrong, with the majesty of the Highest. This finding out a parallel between the most unlike objects, because the individual would wish to find one to support the sense of his own misery and helplessness, is truly Shakespearean; it is an instinctive law of our nature, and the genuine inspiration of the Muse. Racine (but let me not anticipate) would make him pour out three hundred verses of lamentation for his

5 Guy Mannering, chapter 55. But Meg said, "The feet to the East." King Lear, III, iv, 65; but inaccurately quoted. Compare Coleridge, page 101. A mad character in The Heart of Midlothian.

8 II, iv, 194.

loss of kingdom, his feebleness, and his old age, coming to the same conclusion at the end of every third couplet, instead of making him grasp at once at the Heavens for support. The witches in Macbeth are traditional, preternatural personages; and there Sir Walter would have left them, after making what use of them he pleased as a sort of Gothic machinery. Shakespeare makes something more of them, and adds to the mystery by explaining it:

The earth hath bubbles as the water hath,
And these are of them."

We have their physiognomy too:

And enjoin'd silence,

By each at once her choppy finger laying

Upon her skinny lip.10

And the mode of their disappearance is thus described:

And then they melted into thin air."

What an idea is here conveyed of silence and vacancy! The geese of Micklestane Muir (the country woman and her flock of geese turned into stone) in The Black Dwarf are a fine and petrifying metamorphosis; but it is the tradition of the country and no more. Sir Walter has told us nothing farther of it than the first clown whom we might ask concerning it. I do not blame him for that, though I cannot give him credit for what he has not done. The poetry of a novel is a fixture of the spot. Meg Mirrilies I also allow, with all possible good-will, to be a most romantic and astounding personage; yet she is a little melodramatic. Her exits and entrances are pantomimic, and her long red cloak, her elf-locks, the rock on which she stands, and the white cloud behind her, are or might be made the property of a theater. Shakespeare's witches are nearly exploded on the stage. Their broomsticks

Macbeth, I, iii, 79.

10 I, iii, 44; only the second and third lines are Shakespeare's. 11 Hazlitt confuses line 81 ("Into the air") with The Tempest, IV, i, 150.

are left; their metaphysics are gone, buried five editions deep in Captain Medwin's Conversations! 12 The passion of Othello is made out of nothing but itself; there is no external machinery to help it on; its highest intermediate agent is an old-fashioned pocket handkerchief. Yet "there's magic in the web" of thoughts and feelings, done after the commonest pattern of human life. The power displayed in it is that of intense passion and powerful intellect, wielding every-day events, and imparting its force to them, not swayed or carried along by them as in a go-cart. The splendor is that of genius darting out its forked flame on whatever comes in its way, and kindling or melting it in the furnace of affection, whether it be flax or iron. The coloring, the form, the motion, the combination of objects depend on the predisposition of the mind, molding nature to its own purposes; in Sir Walter the mind is as wax to circumstances, and owns no other impress. Shakespeare is a half-worker with nature. Sir Walter is like a man who has got a romantic spinningjenny, which he has only to set a-going, and it does his work for him much better and faster than he can do it for himself. He lays an embargo on "all appliances and means to boot," on history, tradition, local scenery, costume and manners, and makes his characters chiefly up of these. Shakespeare seizes only on the ruling passion, and miraculously evolves all the rest from it. The eagerness of desire suggests every possible event that can irritate or thwart it, foresees all obstacles, catches at every trifle, clothes itself with imagination and tantalizes itself with hope; "sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt," starts at a phantom, and makes the universe tributary to it, and the plaything of its fancy. There is none of this overweening importunity of the imagination in the author of Waverley; he does his work well, but in another-guess manner. His imagination is a matter-of-fact imagination. To return to Othello. Take the celebrated dialogue in the third act. ""Tis common." There is nothing but the writhings and contortings of the heart, probed by affliction's point, as the flesh shrinks under the surgeon's knife. All its starts and flaws are but the conflicts and misgiv

12 Thomas Medwin's Conversations with Lord Byron, 1824, a book which ran into several editions.