graspless on the pen; and in reading of him our hands too grow
graspless on the page. We pursue the man and come upon group after
group of his friends; and each as we demand "What have you done with
Coleridge?" answers "He was here just now, and we helped him forward a
little way." Our best biographies are all of men and women of
character--and, it may be added, of beautiful character--of Johnson,
Scott, and Charlotte Brontë.

There are certain people whose biographies _ought_ to be long. Who
could learn too much concerning Lamb? And concerning Scott, who will
not agree with Lockhart's remark in the preface to his abridged
edition of 1848:--"I should have been more willing to produce an
enlarged edition; for the interest of Sir Walter's history lies, I
think, peculiarly in its minute details"? You may explore here, and
explore there, and still you find pure gold; for the man was gold
right through.

So in the present volume every line is of interest because we refer it
to Scott's known character and test it thereby. The result is always
the same; yet the employment does not weary. In themselves the letters
cannot stand, as mere writing, beside the letters of Cowper, or of
Lamb. They are just the common-sense epistles of a man who to his last
day remained too modest to believe in the extent of his own genius.
The letters in this collection which show most acuteness on literary
matters are not Scott's, but Lady Louisa Stuart's, who appreciated
the Novels on their appearance (their faults as well as their merits)
with a judiciousness quite wonderful in a contemporary. Scott's
literary observations (with the exception of one passage where the
attitude of an English gentleman towards literature is stated
thus--"he asks of it that it shall arouse him from his habitual