There is more than one
novelist of the present day who has far surpassed Scott in the number
of his tales, and one at least of very high repute, who has, I
believe, produced more even within the same time. But though to our
larger experience, Scott's achievement, in respect of mere fertility,
is by no means the miracle which it once seemed, I do not think one of
his successors can compare with him for a moment in the ease and truth
with which he painted, not merely the life of his own time and
country--seldom indeed that of precisely his own time--but that of
days long past, and often too of scenes far distant. The most powerful
of all his stories, _Old Mortality_, was the story of a period more
than a century and a quarter before he wrote; and others,--which
though inferior to this in force, are nevertheless, when compared with
the so-called historical romances of any other English writer, what
sunlight is to moonlight, if you can say as much for the latter as to
admit even that comparison,--go back to the period of the Tudors, that
is, two centuries and a half.
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