The character of Scott, and his place in literature, do not demand much discussion after all that has already been said. He was born to be at once a dweller in the realm of dreams, these dreams being mainly “retrocognitive” of the historic past; and a man of action and of this world; while he had a superabundance of joyous vitality, which overflowed into humorous rhyme, even in his worst hours of cerebral disease, and which inspired at once the central error of his life and the resolute sacrifice of life to honour. These elements of character were, all of them, carried to a pitch unusually high, while their combination, and their union with the most kindly nature, are unprecedented. This vitality, and this unfailing and universal sympathy, made friends for Scott of all sentient creatures, from men, women and children of every rank, to the pig which joined the pack of many dogs and one cat, old Hinse, that scoured the
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 woods with him, and to the strangely sentimental hen which attached itself to Sir Walter. From George IV.—who admired and never turned on Scott—to the hedgers and ditchers on Abbotsford, Scott was endeared to all; in his ruin his old servants refused to leave him, and the music master of his daughters offered him the entire savings of his life. Yet there was no mawkish good nature in Scott; when he bent the heavy arches of his brows the Ettrick Shepherd himself felt that he must “gang warily.” No man was served as he was by his household, and when he told his son that certain conduct would entail his highest displeasure, the young man knew the full meaning of the phrase.
CONCLUSION
Scott’s courtesy was spontaneous and universal—he spoke to all “as if he was their blood relation”—except when he deliberately meant to be discourteous, in one case, to Lord Holland, who had done no more than his duty. He had come athwart the interests of Scott’s brother Thomas, and Scott took up the feud in the ancient spirit of clanship. Yet he lived to pronounce Lord Holland “the most agreeable man he ever knew. In criticism, in poetry, he beats those whose whole study they have been.” Thus Scott must have expiated an error produced by political heat as well as by
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 personal resentment; probably, like the Baron Bradwardine, he sent “Letters of Slains,” or other atonement. Jeffrey says that “this was the only example of rudeness in Scott that he ever witnessed in the course of a lifelong familiarity.” In this lonely case, the person “cut like an old pen” was a man of title and distinction.
It is hardly worth while to controvert the opinion that Scott was a snob. In addressing persons of rank, however familiarly intimate he might be with them, he used their “honour-giving names,” as Agamemnon bids Menelaus do towards the princes of the Achaeans. This was the customary rule of the period. Byron was indignant when Leigh Hunt publicly addressed him as “My dear Byron,” and Byron was an extreme Liberal, while Scott was a Tory. He paid the then recognized dues to rank; such dues are no longer welcome to their recipients. He lived much with people of the highest social position, but he could and did entertain them at the same table with the Ettrick Shepherd, and with guests known to him of old when a schoolboy or as a lawyer’s apprentice. He was observed to pay great deference to a gentleman without any apparent distinction, because he descended from a knight who fought by the side of Wallace.
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In all this his conduct, as in everything else, was dictated by his reverence for the past. That reverence for things old, for what had once been, ideally at least, an ordered system of society, was the cause of Scott’s Toryism, increased by his patriotism during the struggle with Bonaparte. The ideas and sympathies which made him a Tory, made him also an opponent of the system which turned the Highlands into sheep farms and deer forests, by the expulsion of the clansmen. His opinions on this head are expressed in the Introduction to The Legend of Montrose. Again, the feudal ideas at the root of his Toryism made him the most attentive of all landlords to the wellbeing of every soul on his estates. In bad times he found the wisest and most economic way of providing them with employment at once honourable and remunerative, and he taught the Duke of Buccleuch to follow his example on a great scale. He felt pain and embarrassment in face of the gratitude of his poor cotters for a holiday feast and holiday presents: why, he asked himself, should he have more than they? His house was as a great hearth whence radiated light and comfort on the humblest within his radius. Before Mr. Ruskin he endeavoured to bring the happiness of art into the region of the crafts.
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CONCLUSION
“The most of the articles from London were only models for the use of two or three neat-handed carpenters whom he had discovered in the villages near him; and he watched and directed their operations as carefully as a George Bullock could have done; and the results were such as even Bullock might have admired. The great table in the library, for example (a most complex and beautiful one), was done entirely in the room where it now stands, by Joseph Shillinglaw of Darnick—the Sheriff planning and studying every turn as zealously as ever an old lady pondered the development of an embroidered cushion. The hangings and curtains, too, were chiefly the work of a little hunchbacked tailor, by name William Goodfellow (save at Abbotsford, where he answered to Robin), who occupied a cottage on Scott’s farm of the Broomielees; one of the race who creep from homestead to homestead, welcomed wherever they appear by housewife and handmaiden, the great gossips and newsmen of the parish—in Scottish nomenclature cardooers. Proudly and earnestly did all these vassals toil in his service; and I think it was one of them that, when some stranger asked a question about his personal demeanour, answered in words already quoted ‘Sir Walter speaks to every man as if they were blood relations.’ Not long after
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 he had completed his work at Abbotsford little Goodfellow fell sick, and as his cabin was near Chiefswood, I had many opportunities of observing the Sheriff’s kind attention to him in his affliction. I can never forget the evening on which the poor tailor died. When Scott entered the hovel he found everything silent, and inferred from the looks of the good women in attendance that their patient had fallen asleep, and that they feared his sleep was the final one. He murmured some syllables of kind regret; at the sound of his voice the dying tailor unclosed his eyes, and eagerly and wistfully sat up, clasping his hands with an expression of rapturous gratefulness and devotion that, in the midst of deformity, disease, pain, and wretchedness, was at once beautiful and sublime. He cried with a loud voice, ‘The Lord bless and reward you,’ and expired with the effort.”
CONCLUSION
Of Scott’s great charity, which lay in giving affection as well as material aid, examples have been displayed in his latest years. Hi............