What there was in him of true grandeur could never have been seen, had
the fifth act of his life been less tragic than it was. Generous,
large-hearted, and magnanimous as Scott was, there was something in
the days of his prosperity that fell short of what men need for their
highest ideal of a strong man. Unbroken success, unrivalled
popularity, imaginative effort flowing almost as steadily as the
current of a stream,--these are characteristics, which, even when
enhanced as they were in his case, by the power to defy physical pain,
and to live in his imaginative world when his body was writhing in
torture, fail to touch the heroic point. And there was nothing in
Scott, while he remained prosperous, to relieve adequately the glare
of triumphant prosperity. His religious and moral feeling, though
strong and sound, was purely regulative, and not always even
regulative, where his inward principle was not reflected in the
opinions of the society in which he lived. The finer spiritual element
in Scott was relatively deficient, and so the strength of the natural
man was almost too equal, complete, and glaring.
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