WALTER SCOTT
NO one, writing early in the past century of the then contemporary history of European letters, would have hesitated to classify Walter Scott among the stars of first magnitude in the firmament of art and poetry. In the applause then accorded Scott's name there were few dissenting voices indeed. His works were travelling from land to land, everywhere inspiring followers and imitators—rarely, in fact, has a writer ever had pupils at once so numerous and so distinguished. It is not a question either of a "popular" vogue resting on the enthusiasm of unthinking multitudes; no less a person than Goethe spoke of Walter Scott as "a peerless genius, who fully deserves the marvellous success he is having with readers the world over." In the England of the time, it was a commonplace to compare Walter Scott with Shakespeare, the only predecessor of the great Scotchman thought worthy of mention in such connexion for fertility of inventiveness (so people said) for infinite variety of character, scene, situation, episode, for universality of human sympathy, for purity of moral tone.
Later on all this glory passed—even here in Italy; where, as compared with the dozens of translations of Scott's "complete works" issued in the first half of the Nineteenth Century, we find, after 1850, only occasional reprintings of separate volumes in series of "world classics"; while allusions to his books and his people, once so frequent in the speeches of Italian orators and in the writings of Italian authors, became more and more scanty and finally ceased. Our critics, especially after the famous strictures of Taine, showed themselves harsh, not to say cruel and contemptuous toward him—an attitude that has again been taken in Emilio Cecchi's recent History of English Literature. It is, in very truth, a tax on one's self-control to speak kindly of Scott after a conscientious reading of all his works: he wrote too many books, and the labour he imposes upon the reader of to-day—a reader quite blasé to the graces of the old art and familiar with all its tricks that once seemed so clever—fills us with a spite which betrays itself the mo-
