endurance, or of tragic despair. When in Waverley the historic drama of the rising of 1745 has played itself out, and the love-story has been tamely concluded, the figure that remains with us as we close the book, is that of Evan Dhu, the humble follower of the Highland chief Vich Ian Vohr, standing at the condemnation of his master, and pledging himself and six of the clan to die in his stead. "If the Saxon gentlemen are laughing," he said, "because a poor man, such as me, thinks my life or the life of six of my degree is worth that of Vich Ian Vohr, it's like enough they may be very right; but if they laugh because they think I would not keep my word, and come back to redeem him, they ken neither the heart of a Hielandman, nor the honour of a gentleman." Among such types as these we look for Scott's greatest characters: Edie Ochiltree in The Antiquary, Baillie Jarvie in Rob Roy, Peter Peebles in Redgauntlet, and many more who stand out from the novels as complete and substantial figures in which the race of Scotchmen has expressed itself forever. Only once, however, did Scott trust entirely to this element of native strength. In The Heart of Midlothian (1818), he puts aside all conventional plot, and gives us instead the story of Jeanie Deans the peasant girl, who goes to London to beg her sister's life.

Among these local Scotch types there is a group of characters whom Scott used especially to appeal to the romantic sense of his readers. The fantastic figures which stand out of the background, Madge Wildfire in The Heart of Midlothian, Meg Merrilies in Guy Mannering, and Norna of the Fitful Head in The Pirate are far more terrible and mysterious in their reality than the imagined horrors of many of Scott's rivals.

Description and Incident. In the Scotch novels, also, we find Scott's descriptive power at its best. He himself lamented that he had not "the eye of a painter to dissect the various parts of the scene, to comprehend how one bore upon the other, to estimate the effect which various features of the view had in producing its leading and general effect." But," he adds, "show me an old castle, and I was at home at once, filled it with its combatants in their proper costume,

and overwhelmed my readers by the enthusiasm of my description." And he goes on to tell how in crossing Magus Moor he gave such an account of the assassination of the Bishop of St. Andrews that one of his fellow-travellers complained that his night's sleep was frightened away. Scott loved scenery as a background for picturesque action. As Stevenson remarks, some places seem actually to cry out for an appropriate occurrence; and Scott's minute acquaintance with Scotch history suggested to him the incidents by which he gives to his scenes their final reality, and makes them an essential part in the dramatic action of his story. A noteworthy instance of this faculty occurs in Old Mortality, where Morton visits Balfour of Burley in the cave reached by a single tree-trunk bridging the chasm of a waterfall. As Morton approaches he hears the shouts and screams of the old Covenanter, in whom religious fury has become insanity; and at length he sees the fearful figure of Burley in strife with the fiends which beset him. The effect of threatening scenery and of the terror of madness is brought to a focus, as it were, at the instant when Burley sends the tree crashing into the abyss, leaving Morton to jump for his life.

Scott's Use of History.-In his later novels Scott went more and more outside of Scotland for material. In Ivanhoe (1820) he treated the return of Richard I. to his kingdom; in Kenilworth (1821), the intrigues of Leicester in seeking to marry Queen Elizabeth; in The Fortunes of Nigel (1822), the time of James I. In Quentin Durward (1823) he went to the continent, picturing the struggle of Louis XI. with Charles the Bold, and in The Talisman (1825) that of Richard I. with Saladin. In these English and continental novels it must be admitted that historical interest and study did not supply all that personal knowledge and enthusiasm gave to the Scotch. Yet in the former we find some of Scott's most brilliant portraits of historical characters, and his reconstructions of social and political conditions are among the triumphs of the historical imagination. And especially do these stories display Scott's mastery of the art of the historical novel-his power of making history live by virtue of its connection with fiction,

and of giving interest and dignity to fiction by making it turn on the progress of great historical movements.

Scott's Example. Since Scott's day many novelistsDickens, Thackeray, Charles Kingsley, and George Eliot, have made attempts in the historical field. Bulwer Lytton's Last Days of Pompeii is the best known of his many volumes. In The Cloister and the Hearth by Charles Reade, we have the author's masterpiece, and one of the best historical novels since Scott. This vogue of the historical novel must be attributed in large part to Scott's example.

In general, however, the romantic temper, which first commended historical material to the novelist, gave place, after Scott's death, to a different mood. Scott's romantic pictures of the feudal past were flattering to a people struggling, as they thought, to preserve the relics of that past from the engulfing revolution. But after the immediate effect of the Napoleonic wars had passed away, new ideas began to make progress in England, broadening the current of English thought and life. The rapidity of social changes beginning with the Reform Bill of 1832, served to draw men's attention to the life of their own time. And while the taste for the new and the startling in literature still persisted, it was satisfied chiefly, as in Defoe's time, by the presentation of the exciting aspects of present-day society. Of these tendencies the best examples are to be found in the works of Edward Bulwer Lytton (1803-1873), Charles Reade (1814-1884), and Charles Dickens.

IV. CHARLES DICKENS (1812-1870)

Dickens's Life.-Charles Dickens was born at Portsea, where his father was a navy clerk in poor circumstances. The family moved to Chatham, and thence to London, where the elder Dickens was arrested for debt, his family accompanying him to the Marshalsea Prison. His son, a boy of ten years, was thought old enough to contribute his mite toward the parents' necessities, and was accordingly put at work in a blacking warehouse, sleeping beneath a counter, and spending his Sundays-his few hours of brightness in

these wretched weeks-in the prison with his family. When matters improved a little, Charles Dickens was given a few years of school before he was obliged to take up again the part of bread-winner, first as a lawyer's clerk, and then as a reporter. His education remained deficient, but he brought from these years of desperate struggle with life a character of wonderful energy and resolution, a wide knowledge of the under world, and a deep sympathy with its inhabitants— all of which played a part in his subsequent career.

It was while Dickens, then about twenty, was a reporter that he began to write sketches of London life for the newspapers. These were collected in 1836 as Sketches by Boz, and from this time forth Dickens's fortune was changed. He became editor of magazines, and, for a time, of a great London newspaper; he travelled widely in Europe and America; he took up public questions and attacked social wrongs. And without any intermission he gave to the public that famous series of novels in which the humors of English life were displayed so abundantly, and the cause of the suffering pleaded so eloquently. Before he was thirty he was a great writer; and before he was forty, a notable public man. No writer in English ever gathered with a fuller hand the rewards of the literary calling. It is true, other writers have made more money, or have won peerages; but none has had in his lifetime so wide and intensely loyal a personal following; none has had, in addition to money, friends, and fame, the peculiar tribute which came to Dickens from vast audiences gathered together, not once or twice, but hundreds of times, in scores of cities, to testify by "roaring seas of applause" to his personal triumph. In middle life Dickens began to give semi-dramatic public readings from his works, and these grew to be his chief interest. The strain and excitement wore him out. It is a circumstance as tragic in its way as that which shadows the close of Scott's life, that this personal triumph was the direct cause of Dickens's death in 1870.

Dickens's Relation to the Public.-Dickens's peculiar success calls attention to the prime fact in his authorship, his nearness to his public. He began his career as a reporter, in the profession which is most immediately of the people. But

though necessity made him a journalist, he wished to be an actor. As a young man he tried to get a position at Covent Garden Theatre. For years he was the leading spirit in a famous company of amateurs who played in various cities of England; and, as we have seen, his chief interest came to be his public readings. These two professional instincts account for much in Dickens's work. As reporter and as editor he studied his public; as actor, he taught himself to play upon it, through his writings and his dramatic readings from them, with incomparable skill.

Dickens's Characters. From Dickens's success in Sketches by Boz came, in 1836, an engagement to write the letterpress for a series of cartoons representing the humors of sporting life. For this purpose he invented the "Pickwick Club," which at once made a popular hit. The death of the artist who was engaged upon the drawings left Dickens free to widen the scope of the adventures of the club, and to add other characters without stint. The complete result was a great book, formless as to plot, crowded with humorous figures. These figures are given with broadly exaggerated traits, as if Dickens had always in mind the cartoon which was to accompany the text. The characters talk freely, not to say inexhaustibly, and all differently. But the author's chief resource is his faculty for bringing his caricatures into contact with the actual world, in situations that expose their oddities in high relief. Mr. Tupman as a lover, Mr. Winkle as a duellist or a sportsman, Mr. Pickwick in a breach-of-promise suit with the Widow Bardell, the Pickwick Club contending with a recalcitrant horse, the Reverend Mr. Stiggins drunk at a temperance meeting-these incongruities are narrated in a style always copious, but often rapid and piquant.

In his later novels Dickens improved on his first attempts. He continued to be a caricaturist, to rely on distortions and exaggerations of feature or of manner, but his pencil became more subtle and his figures more significant. Micawber "waiting for something to turn up," Sairy Gamp haunted by the mythical Mrs. Harris, 'umble Uriah Heep, sanctimonious Pecksniff, cheerful Mark Tapley, all have distinct individ