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IVANHOE.
No. 15.— REBECCA.
The character of Rebecca stands pre-eminent amid Scott's finest conceptions. Its nobility was at once acknowledged. If there be one thing which redeems our fallen nature, which attests that its origin was from heaven and its early home in paradise, it is the generous sympathy that, even in the most hardened and worldly, warms in the presence of the good and of the beautiful. There must have been, even in those whose course has darkened into crime, an innocent and hopeful time, and the light of that hour, however perverted and shadowed, is never quite extinguished. Enough remains to kindle, if but for a moment, the electric admiration whose flash, like the lightning, is from above. Fiction is but moulding together the materials collected by every day, in real as well as imagined life; the highest order of excellence carries the impulse along with it. Nature and fortune have this earth for their place of contention, and the victory is too often with the latter. We are tempted and we fall—
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