In the sketch of the St. Ronan's Spa and the company
at the _table-d'hote_, he is of course somewhere near the mark,--he
was too able a man to fall far short of success in anything he really
gave to the world; but it is not interesting. Miss Austen would have
made Lady Penelope Penfeather a hundred times as amusing. We turn to
Meg Dods and Touchwood, and Cargill, and Captain Jekyl, and Sir Bingo
Binks, and to Clara Mowbray,--i. e. to the lives really moulded by
large and specific causes, for enjoyment, and leave the small gossip
of the company at the Wells as, relatively at least, a failure. And it
is well for all the world that it was so. The domestic novel, when
really of the highest kind, is no doubt a perfect work of art, and an
unfailing source of amusement; but it has nothing of the tonic
influence, the large instructiveness, the stimulating intellectual
air, of Scott's historic tales. Even when Scott is farthest from
reality--as in _Ivanhoe_ or _The Monastery_--he makes you open your
eyes to all sorts of historical conditions to which you would
otherwise be blind.
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