"Uncle Tom's Cabin," compared with the multitudes who read that most
powerful and popular book forty years ago? How changing, if not
transient, is the fame of the novelist as well as of the poet! With
reference to him even the same generation changes its tastes. What
filled us with delight as young men or women of twenty, is at fifty
spurned with contempt or thrown aside with indifference. No books ever
filled my mind and soul with the delight I had when, at twelve years of
age, I read "The Children of the Abbey" and "Thaddeus of Warsaw," What
man of eighty can forget the enthusiasm with which he read "Old
Mortality" or "Ivanhoe" when he was in college?

Perhaps one test of a great book is the pleasure derived from reading it
over and over again,--as we read "Don Quixote," or the dramas of
Shakspeare, of whose infinite variety we never tire. Measured by this
test, the novels of Sir Walter Scott are among the foremost works of
fiction which have appeared in our world. They will not all retain their
popularity from generation to generation, like "Don Quixote" or "The
Pilgrim's Progress" or "The Vicar of Wakefield;" but these are single
productions of their authors, while not a few of Scott's many novels are
certainly still read by cultivated people,--if not with the same
interest they excited when first published, yet with profit and
admiration. They have some excellencies which are immortal,--elevation
of sentiment, chivalrous regard for women, fascination of narrative
(after one has waded through the learned historical introductory
chapters), the absence of exaggeration, the vast variety of characters
introduced and vividly maintained, and above all the freshness and
originality of description, both of Nature and of man. Among the
severest and most bigoted of New England Puritans, none could find
anything corrupting or demoralizing in his romances; whereas Byron and
Bulwer were never mentioned without a shudder, and even Shakspeare was