The most striking feature of Scott's romances is that, for the most part,
they are pivoted on public rather than mere private interests and
passions. With but few exceptions--(_The Antiquary_, _St. Ronan's Well_,
and _Guy Mannering_ are the most important)--Scott's novels give us an
imaginative view, not of mere individuals, but of individuals as they are
affected by the public strifes and social divisions of the age. And this
it is which gives his books so large an interest for old and young,
soldiers and statesmen, the world of society and the recluse, alike. You
can hardly read any novel of Scott's and not become better aware what
public life and political issues mean. And yet there is no artificiality,
no elaborate attitudinizing before the antique mirrors of the past, like
Bulwer's, no dressing out of clothes-horses like G. P. R. James. The
boldness and freshness of the present are carried back into the past, and
you see Papists and Puritans, Cavaliers and Roundheads, Jews, Jacobites,
and freebooters, preachers, schoolmasters, mercenary soldiers, gipsies,
and beggars, all living the sort of life which the reader feels that in
their circumstances and under the same conditions of time and place and
parentage, he might have lived too.
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