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. As his remarks are not accessible, as we must try to judge
"Waverley" like readers inured to much fiction and much criticism, we
must confess, no doubt, that the commencement has the faults which the
first reviewers detected, and it which Scott acknowledged.
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