THE SCOTT CENTENARY. any adequate manner his services to his country and mankind would be a task of a very different kind. It would involve nothing less than a review of the literature which he found, the literature which he left, and the literature which a later age has created, and an examination into the part which literature holds in the vital system of a people. I need hardly say that the first and simpler method of treating the subject is the one which I propose to myself, and that in approaching even that, I am sensible how much I stand in need of your indulgence. I would first remind you of the amount of work accomplished by Scott, and the comparatively brief period in which it was performed. In 1796, his twenty-fifth year, he began to toy with literature as a translator of German ballads. But his own original writ The 15th August, 1871, was the hundredth anniversary of Sir Walter Scott's birth, and the Edinburgh Border Counties Association inaugurated the movement for a festival in honour of the memory of Scott, to be held on that occasion. For reasons of convenience, the celebration was arranged to take place on Wednesday the 9th August, and accordingly, with few exceptions, the centenary honours were paid on that day. In the principal cities of the United Kingdom, of America, the Continent, and the colonies, and, indeed, wherever there was a reading population, the genius of Scott was gratefully remembered in public and private on the hundredth anniversary of his birth.ings, beginning with the House of Aspen, and Edinburgh, being his natal city, was appropriately the centre of these rejoicings; and as the British Association held its meeting there in August, the number of strangers who attended the chief festival was considerably increased. During the day the city was crowded with visitors from far and near; flags were raised on the public buildings and on several private houses; relics of "the great magician" -his manuscripts, portraits, and other articles intimately associated with his life and workswere exhibited in the Royal Scottish Academy; and, in brief, town and people presented the appearance of a national and popular holiday. In the evening various parts of the town were illuminated and the streets were crowded with sightseers. The Scott banquet was held in the Corn Exchange, which was decorated for the occasion, and the company numbered about two thousand. Amongst the guests were the most famous representatives of literature, art, and science. The Earl of Dalkeith-one of the Scotts of Buccleuch-presided, and the vice-chairmen were Sir William Stirling-Maxwell, the Earl of Dalhousie, Lord Jerviswood, the Lord Justice-general, and the Lord-provost of Edinburgh. As one of the best specimens of the oratory which the occasion inspired, we desire to preserve here the address of Sir W. Stirling-Maxwell, who, after the customary loyal toasts from the chair, proposed "The Memory of Sir Walter Scott." SIR WILLIAM STIRLING-MAXWELL said:-To offer for your consideration some of the reasons why the memory of Sir Walter Scott should be honoured in an assembly composed mainly of his countrymen, and wholly of his admirers, may seem a very simple task. To state in ending with the Surgeon's Daughter, all saw the light between 1799 and 1831. His career as a popular poet may be said to have opened with the Lay of the Last Minstrel in 1805, and ended with Harold the Dauntless in 1917. His career as our first writer of prose fiction. commenced with Waverley in 1814, and closed with his life. By the side of this ample and sparkling stream of original writing flowed another of scarcely inferior volume, consisting of miscellaneous works, editorial, critical, biographical, or historical, of which it is enough to mention the editions of Dryden and Swift, the Life of Napoleon, and the Tales of a Grandfather. As an officer of the Court of Session and sheriff of Selkirk, professional work occupied a considerable portion of his time, and so also did the mercantile concerns in which he was unfortunately a partner. For a good many years, the years of seeming financial prosperity, say from 1817 or 1818 to 1825, he was one of the most prominent figures in social life in Scotland, and one of the favourite lions of London. In these busy thirty-two years enough was done to fill the lives of ten not inconsiderable mortals. One of the Homeric heroes seemed to have reappeared upon the earth, clothed in superhuman strength and the wig and gown of a Scotch advocate. (Applause.) As a poet, Scott, like other great masters of the lyre, may be said to have fulfilled the aspirations, and given full and triumphant truth to the thought, with which many kindred minds have been in labour, but which they had lacked strength to bring forth. In days when letters here in Scotland were still young, there was a strong disposition to gather up, and afterwards a no less strong wish to reproduce, the relics of earliest song. The ballads which collectors like George Bannatyne and Richard Maitland loved, later poets like Allan Ramsay and Elizabeth Halket eagerly imitated, and so considerable was the power and the industry of these imitators that it has lately been argued with plausibility that the best of our so-called old Scottish ballads belong to the age of Sir Roger de Coverley. Thomson's Castle of Indolence and Percy's Reliques are later indications of the tendency of thought and taste which in another branch of art was likewise marked by the plaster pinnacles of Strawberry Hill. Scott himself, cradled in the ballad-land, became the most zealous as well as the ablest of ballad editors. In collecting materials for the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, thinking, as it was said, "of little but the queerness and the fun," he was making himself for the work of his life. He was also in no small degree making at the same time the public taste to which that work was to be submitted. In fulness of time the Lay of the Last Minstrel was born, to fascinate a world athwart which the genius of Burns had lately flashed, but in which Hayley was probably the most popular poet, and the laurel of Dryden certainly wreathed the brows of Pye. Few critics will question the supremacy of Scott, at least in our language, in the field of metrical romance. Opinion may vary as to the rank to be assigned to that class of composition. Other poets have soared higher into the empyrean of thought, or have dived deeper into the mystery of life, but none has ever told his tale with greater breadth of light and shade, or hurried his reader along with a more genial vivacity; none has ever lit up the banquet-hall or the battle-field with more of Homeric fire, or adorned his action with a more exquisite transcript of the scenery of nature. (Applause.) It is in virtue of these qualities that a great poet holds as his own for ever the ground, historical or topographical, which his wand has once touched; and conquests of this kind are in one sense a measure of his power. In this sphere Scott is certainly the greatest of peaceful and beneficent conquerors in the world of letters. Bannockburn and Flodden are his; Melrose and Dunvegan, and many a fair domain and ancient pile between. The house of Buccleuch is not less indebted to his genius than to the valour of another Sir Walter, the favour of King James, or the good housewifery of the lady of the Lay. Of this city, his own romantic town, he is, in our legal language, the unquestioned feudal superior. It is curious now to turn to his friend Moore's playful allusions to these poetical conquests at beat him, the time Rokeby was announced in 1814. Writing in the character of Messrs. Lackington to one of their authors, he says that Scott, "Having quitted the Borders to seek new renown, Is coming by long quarto stages to town, And, beginning with Rokeby, the job's sure to pay; Means to do all the gentlemen's seats on the way. Now the scheme is, though none of our hackneys can To start a new poet through Highgate to meet him; Who by means of quick proofs, no revises, long coaches, May do a few villas before Scott approaches. Indeed, if our Pegasus be not curst shabby, He'll reach without foundering at least Woburn Abbey." It is needless to remind you that ere the fresh poet alighted at Woburn gate Scott had pursued his raid far into England, and with new arms had annexed Ashby and Kenilworth, Whitefriars and Whitehall. (Applause.) Had Scott written nothing but his lyrics he would still hold a distinguished place in letters. "Rosabelle," "Lochinvar," "Jock o' Hazeldean," "Norah's Vow," and "The Pibroch of Donuil Dhu" will be sung and loved as long as tenderness and melody, pith and vigour, archness, gaiety, and delicate humour shall please the ear, inspire the fancy, and touch the heart. These and other songs of Scott have made the tour of the world with the songs of Burns, and haunt the memory of most men who love poetry and speak English. They are the very songs to be sung in a strange land by exiles not much given to weeping and hanging their harps on willows, and who yet at Vancouver or Hong-Kong very steadily think of Scotland, knowing, or perhaps not knowing, how greatly the Scotland to which their hearts turn is the intellectual creation of Scott. It is the poet's best reward, we are told by Longfellow, to find his song in the heart of a friend. Scott, like Longfellow himself, is a poet who enjoys "love, honour, and obedience, troops of friends." One of the latest of his stranger-friends whom I have met with turned up in North-Eastern Siberia. If you will look into the pleasant tent-life in that country of Mr. George Kennan, an American surveyor, you will find him discovering analogies between the scenery around him and the Western Highlands of Scott's poetry, and recording how he and his party made the woodlands of Kamtschatka re-echo to the wild and unaccustomed war-notes of "Bonnie Dundee." I would now ask you to look at Scott as a writer of prose fiction, who, from the stores of his learning and the spring of his imagination, fed for sixteen years the fancy of the civilized world, ministering no less to the social and moral well-being than to the innocent gaiety of nations. The Waverley Novels provided a new pleasure for the reading world, even for the little fastidious world of jaded elderly critics. To him who has never seen the sea or the mountains, the first sight of either becomes an epoch in his life. Many of us, I believe, cherish as a choice reminiscence our first glimpse of the fair imaginary realm which was created by Scott. My own first peep of it I well remember, obtained by means of a review which I got hold of when at an age at which the nature and uses of quarterly criticism were for me as yet very dim. The delight with which I devoured the extracts in small print was only equalled by the disgust with which I floundered amongst the comments in a larger type, lamentable fits of insanity, as I thought them, befalling in some mysterious manner my matchless story-teller. It was not till several years afterwards that the book itself fell into my hands, and the well-remembered names of Isaac of York, Rebecca and Rowenna, told me that I had found an old friend in Ivanhoe. I venture to mention this trivial personal incident in hopes that it may recall to many of you whom I have the honour to address, various green spots, diverse and yet similar, of auld langsyne connected with Scott and his writings. (Applause.) The effect which the first Waverley Novel may produce on a fresh and imaginative mind, now when Scott has taught his craft to so many cunning hands, can give but a very faint idea of the success of Waverley. "The small anonymous sort of a novel," as Scott called it in sending it to Mr. Morritt by the mail of the 9th July, 1814, very speedily took the world by storm. Five years later, on the publication of the eighth of the series, a reviewer so discriminating and so little given to reckless praise as Mr. Jeffrey announced that no such prodigy had been known since Shakspeare wrote his thirty-eight plays in the brief space of his early manhood. This opinion was recorded upon the appearance of Kenilworth, Nigel, Durward, and various other favourites, scarce less successful than their predecessors. Detailed criticism would be out of place here, where we are met to agree that as Stratford did for Shakspeare, so Edinburgh must do for Scott. The long procession of ideal figures, headed by Waverley and the Baron of Bradwardine, and closed by Richard Middlemas and the French Begum, forms stern and solemn, or gay and sportive, courtly or grotesque, of every age and sex, of many climes, periods, and moods of mind, which proceeded from the brain of Scott, have furnished a goodly quota of their number to the world's gallery, where the people of the poet's dream stand side by side with the personages of history, and where it often occurs to us, who are the transitory visitors to the 1 show, to exclaim with the Spanish monk before the canvas of Titian "These are the real men, And we the painted shadows on the wall." (Applause.) Who of us, indeed, do not feel Don Quixote and his squire, Hamlet and Falstaff, to be our fellow-creatures quite as truly as Philip III. or the Minister Lerma, or Devereux or Cecil or Queen Bess herself? Scott has filled more places in the historical Valhalla than any other writer, Shakspeare alone excepted. To the history of this little corner of northern Europe, this single Scotchman, bending his big brow over his desk, has given a wide and splendid celebrity, far beyond the reach, at least far beyond the attainment of the strong hands and stout hearts and busy brains of the whole perfervid race of other days at home and abroad. (Applause.) His reading of our national story is probably the version which will long be accepted by the world. In one point, indeed, it was fiercely challenged. The sufferings and services of the Covenanters had made them popular idols, and some good men were startled at being shown that their idols had a comic side, and on being reminded that in respect and sympathy for freedom of thought the black Prelatist and the true-blue Presbyterian were in the relative condition of the pot and the kettle in the fable. But I question if any of the controversialists who entered the field against Scott ever recognized more fully than he did that the spirit which leads men to lay down their lives for what they hold to be truth is the very breath of national life; if any Whig writer has ever painted a more touching picture of the better men of Bothwellhaugh than the novelist who delighted to wear the white cockade of the cavalier. In fact, the good corn of the history of the Kirk seems to owe quite as much to the winnowing it received from Scott as to the painful garnerings of honest Wodrow, in whose husbandry flail and fanner were unknown. If the world beyond the Tweed is likely for long to read Scottish history with the eyes of Scott, it is still more certain to adopt his estimate of the character of our people. Coleridge used to say, "Whenever I have occasion to speak of a Scotch rascal, I always lay the emphasis on Scotch." This principle Scott applied in a somewhat larger spirit. His Scotch characters, Highland and Lowland, tinted with all the delicate shades of local and social colour, gentle and simple, good and bad, are all emphatically | any adequate idea of his greatness. The pangs Scotch. It is not for a Scotchman to say whether our great painter has or has not been "To all our virtues very kind, To all our faults a little blind." But we certainly ought to be well content with the national portraiture, and do each what in us lies to perpetuate its nobler features. The work that Burns yearned after from the depths of his passionate heart, Scott has actually accomplished. From the story of our feuds and factions, from the dust and blood of the past, his genius and his patriotism have culled all that was pure and lovely and of good report, and have woven it into an immortal chaplet for the brow of Caledonia. He has fanned the fire of Scottish nationality without detriment-nay, with positive advantage to that higher and nobler nationality which rallies around the flag whereon the white cross fits so compactly into the red. Wherever the British flag flies it will find no better or truer defenders there than those Scotchmen who best know and love their Scott. (Applause.) Amidst moral and intellectual benefits, I must not forget the important contributions of Scott to the material prosperity of his native land. The dead poet whom we celebrate is as distinctly an employer of labour as any of those captains of industry whose looms whirl by the Tweed or whose furnaces flame along the Clyde. Here, there, everywhere, pilgrims are flocking to the shrines which he has built for himself and his country; and trades and occupations of all kinds flourish by the brain which lies in Dryburgh, as they formerly flourished by the brain of St. Thomas. Mrs. Dodds of the Cleikum, Neil Blane of the Howff, and others, his pleasant publicans, are only a few of those whom Scott has established in a roaring business. When land is to be sold in any district of the Scott countries, his scenes and his characters therewith connected, and even his passing allusions, are carefully chronicled amongst other attractions in the advertisement, and duly inventoried amongst the title-deeds of the estate. It would be hard to say how many years' purchase Scott has added to the value of Branksome, or of the Eildon pastures. But there is no doubt that the touch of his pen does in many places form an important element of that unearned increment of value that, I believe, is the scientific termwhich Mr. Stuart Mill and friends propose shortly to transfer from the lords of the soil to the Lords of the Treasury. Some of Scott's truest admirers have been disposed to regret that there is no single piece of his that gives of parturition were indeed unknown to that "There was," says Hazlitt, "a de- It is natural at first sight to regret all this headlong haste, and to wish that four or five of the novels had been compressed "gem of into a perfect work of art, into a purest ray serene" altogether worthy of the mind whence it came. No doubt the rule of Goldsmith's connoisseur is generally a sound one, that the picture would have been better had the painter taken more pains; and if we can conceive such a thing as a pedagogue seated with a row of possible Walter Scotts before him, it would be highly proper that he should impress the maxim on their young minds. But as the genius of Scott was in so many points exceptional, it is possible that it may have worked under special laws of its own, and that something of the charm of his works may belong to their rapid and spontaneous flow, like the rush of a river or melody from the throats of birds "That carol their sweet pleasures to the spring." (Applause.) The influence of Scott upon liter- "The royal Albyn's tartan as a belt . But his school can likewise boast of several "By many names men call them, In France, Hugo, De Vigny, the elder Dumas; fiction his influence was very great. His writings stimulated historical research in a hundred directions; and he was the founder of the Bannatyne Club, parent model of many similar societies prolific of goodly quartos. In his romances the delighted reader had found himself brought face to face with personages whom he had before seen only as in a glass darkly. Historians began to take a leaf out of the great novelist's book; to use a style more dramatic and pictorial; to develop individual character; and bestow unwonted pains on accessories of time and place. Is it too much to say that of the most graceful digressions of Hallam; we probably owe to the example of Scott some something of the splendid scene-painting of Macaulay; something of the electric light flashed over many famous men, and into many dark Is it unreasonable to suppose that his great places, from the pen of Carlyle? (Applause.) genius has exercised an influence, not the less real because untraced, unseen, unsuspected, like the influence of the Gulf Stream diffusing itself through our western sounds and sea-coasts in softer verdure and richer foliage? Of all the legacies which Scott has bequeathed to mankind, I believe none are more precious than his own character and life. (Applause.) Happy in many things, unhappy in a few, he was singularly happy in a biographer. Amongst our chosen book companions, amongst the friends that can never alter nor forsake, Lockhart's Life of Scott deserves to hold a place of chief honour and ready access. I doubt whether the world has ever been told so much about any one man by any single biographer-whether the life of a great man has ever fallen into the hands of a writer with equal opportunity of knowing the whole truth, and equal faculty for telling it; and whether the whole Biographie Universelle can furnish a single other name that would show so fair if the whole life which belonged to it were unrolled like that of Scott, year by year, almost day by day, before the gaze of his fellowmen. (Applause.) The admiration with which Scott was regarded during the larger portion of his life was great, but the love and affection which he inspired during his whole life was still greater. Warmly and widely loved before he was famous, in later days he attracted the regard of various remarkable persons to whom his fame was an unknown quantity. In Paris, in 1815, amongst all the celebrities of Europe, he seemed especially to fascinate Blucher and Platoff the Cossack, the latter of whom, cantering down the Rue de la Paix, would jump off his horse to kiss him. It Even in the fields less peculiarly his own than is highly improbable that either the Prussian |