of the English, which mostly takes a "comfortable form," a grow-your-own mutton sort of complacency, silent, and reserved, as if there were a domestic decorum in it—warm and quiet as his own fireside; still less is it the vanity of the Frenchman, who looks upon the victories of the nation as matters of personal triumph, the grandeur of the Tuilleries as his own, and the great qualities of all the great men of France as reflected upon himself. The Scotchman's is a feeling altogether different; it is at once a deep steady friendship, and a blind enthusiastic love. He is little ready to admit those merits in another land, in which his own is deficient; he undervalues them, if he cannot altogether deny their existence; he holds them as superfluities. Something of the harsh, yet fine, outline of his native mountains, belongs to his moral structure; he makes few allowances, and though cautious of expressing his opinion, he has a calm rooted disdain for all customs and ideas which have not upon them the broad arrow of Scottish origin. His sense of right is strong within him; more based upon principle than impulse, it is usually an adhering guide through life. His religion is a stern reckoning with the frailties of mortality, and what he has of excitement belongs to his national poetry and music; it has but one fête in the year, and that is St. Andrew's Day. In no one narrative has Scott more forcibly embodied the peculiarities of his
VOL.IIG
