lands, to the Reformation, the Crusades, to Richard, the Lionhearted, and to Louis XI. He would wish to see him clear away the obscurity which two centuries have been collecting over it, and unroll a vast, comprehensive, and vivid panorama of our old New England lifetimes, from its sublimest moments to its minutest manners. He would wish to see him begin with the landing of the Pilgrims, and pass down to the War of Independence, from one epoch and one generation to another, like Old Mortality among the graves of the unforgotten faithful, wiping the dust from the urns of our fathers, gathering up whatever of illustrious achievement, of heroic suffering, of unwavering faith, their history commemorates, and weaving it all into an immortal and noble national literature, pouring over the whole time, its incidents, its actors, its customs, its opinions, its moods of feeling, the brilliant illustration, the unfading glories, which the fictions of genius alone can give to the realities of life.

For our lawyers, politicians, and for most purposes of mere utility, business, and intellect, our history now perhaps unfolds a sufficiently "ample page." But I confess I should love to see it assume a form in which it should speak directly to the heart and affections and imagination of the whole people. I should love to see by the side of these formidable records of dates and catalogues of British governors and provincial acts of Assembly, these registers of the settlement of towns and the planting of churches and convocation of synods and drawing up of platforms,- by the side of these austere and simply severe narratives of Indian wars, English usurpations, French intrigues, Colonial risings, and American independence, I should love to see by the side of these great and good books about a thousand neat duodecimos of the size of "Ivanhoe," "Kenilworth," and "Marmion," all full of pictures of our natural beauty and grandeur, the still richer pictures of our society and manners, the lights and shadows of our life, full of touching incidents, generous sentiments, just thoughts, beaming images, such as are scattered over everything which Scott has written, as thick as stars on the brow of night, and give to everything he has written that imperishable, strange charm, which will be on it and embalm it forever. . . . ·

I venture to maintain, first, that such works as these would possess a very high historical value. They would be valuable for the light they would shed upon the first one hundred and

fifty years of our Colonial existence. They would be valuable as helps to history, as contributions to history, as real and authoritative documents of history. They would be valuable for the same reason that the other more formal and graver records of our history are so, if not quite in the same degree.

To make this out, it may be necessary to pause a moment and analyze these celebrated writings, and inquire what they contain and how they are made up. It is so easy to read Scott's Novels that we are apt to forget with how much labor he prepared himself to write them. We are imposed on, startled perhaps, by the words novel and poem. We forget that any one of them is not merely a brilliant and delightful romance, but a deep, well-considered, and instructive essay on the manners, customs, and political condition of England or Scotland at the particular period to which it refers. Such is the remark of a foreign critic of consummate taste and learning, and it is certainly just. Let us reverently attempt to unfold the process to indicate the course of research and reflection by which they are perfected, and thus to detect the secret not so much of their extraordinary power and popu larity as of their historical value.

He selects, then, I suppose (I write of him as living; for, though dead, he still speaks to the whole reading population of the world), first, the country in which he will lay the scenes of his action, Scotland, perhaps, or merry England, or the beautiful France. He marks off the portions of that country within which the leading incidents shall be transacted, as a conjurer draws the charmed circle with his wand on the floor of the Cave of Magic. Then he studies the topography of the region its scenery, its giant mountains, its lakes, glens, forests, falls of water as minutely as Malté Brun or Humboldt; but choosing out with a poet's eye and retaining with a poet's recollection the grand, picturesque, and graceful points of the whole transcendent landscape. Then he goes on to collect and treasure up the artificial, civil, historical features of the country. He explores its antiquities, becomes minutely familiar with every city and castle and cathedral which still stands and with the grander ruins of all which have fallen,— familiar with every relic and trace of man and art, down even to the broken cistern which the Catholic charity of a former age had hewn out by the wayside for the pilgrim to drink in. He gathers up all the traditions and legendary history of the

place, every story of "hopeless love or glory won," with the time, the spot, the circumstances, as particularly and as fondly as if he had lived there a thousand years. He selects the age to which his narrative shall refer, perhaps that. of Richard, or Elizabeth, or Charles the Second, or of the rebellion of 1745; and forthwith engages in a deep and discursive study of its authentic history and biography, its domestic and foreign politics, the state of parties, the character and singularities of the reigning king and his court and of the prominent personages of the day, its religious condition, the wars, revolts, revolutions, and great popular movements, all the predominant objects of interest and excitement, and all which made up the public and out-of-door life and history of that particular generation. He goes deeper still: the state of society, the manners, customs, and employments of the people, their dress, their arms and armor, their amusements, their entire indoor and domestic life, the rank and accomplishments of the sexes respectively, their relations to each other, the extent of their popular and higher education, their opinions, superstitions, morals, jurisprudence, and police,-all these he investigates as earnestly as if he were nothing but an antiquarian, but with the liberal, enlightened, and tolerant curiosity of a scholar, philosopher, philanthropist, who holds that man is not only the most proper, but most delightful study of man. Thus thoroughly furnished, he chooses an affecting incident, real or imaginary, for his groundwork, and rears upon it a composition which the mere novel - reader will admire for its absorbing narrative and catastrophe; the critic for its elegant style, dazzling poetry, and elaborate art; the student of human nature for its keen and shrewd views of man, "for each change of many-colored life he draws"; the student of history for its penetrating development and its splendid, exact, and comprehensive illustration of the spirit of one of the marked ages of the world. And this is a Waverley Novel!

Perhaps I am now prepared to restate and maintain the general position which I have taken, that a series of North American or New England Waverley Novels would be eminently valuable auxiliaries to the authoritative written history of New England and of North America.

In the first place, they would embody, and thus would fix deep in the general mind and memory of the whole people, a

vast amount of positive information quite as authentic and valuable and curious as that which makes up the matter of professed history, but which the mere historian does not and cannot furnish. They would thus be not substitutes for history, but supplements to it. Let us dwell upon this consideration for a moment. It is wonderful, when you think closely on it, how little of all which we should love to know and ought to know about a former period and generation a really standard history tells us. From the very nature of that kind of composition it must be so. Its appropriate and exclusive topics are a few prominent, engrossing, and showy incidents,— wars, conquests, revolutions, changes of dynasties, battles, and sieges, the exterior and palpable manifestations of the workings of the stormy and occasional passions of men moving in large masses on the high places of the world. These topics it treats instructively and eloquently. But what an inadequate conception does such a book give you of the time, the country, and the people to which it relates! What a meagre, cold, and unengaging outline does it trace, and how utterly deficient in minute, precise, and circumstantial and satisfactory information! How little does it tell you of the condition and character of the great body of the people,— their occupations, their arts and customs, their joys and sorrows! how little of the origin, state, and progress of opinions and of the spirit of the age! How misty, indistinct, and tantalizing are the glimpses you gain of that old, fair, wonderful creation which you long to explore! It is like a vast landscape painting in which nothing is represented but the cloven summit and grand sweep of the mountain, a portion of the sounding shore of the illimitable sea, the dim, distant course of a valley, traversed by the father of rivers two thousand miles in length, and which has no place for the enclosed corn-field, the flocks upon a thousand hills, the cheerful country-seat, the village spires, the churchyard, the vintage, the harvest-home, the dances of peasants, and the "cotter's Saturday night."

Now the use, one use, of such romances as Scott's is to supply these deficiencies of history. Their leading object, perhaps, may be to tell an interesting story with some embellishments of poetry and eloquence and fine writing and mighty dialogue. But the plan on which they are composed requires that they should interweave into their main design a

near, distinct, and accurate, but magnified and ornamental view of the times, people, and country to which that story goes back. They are, as it were, telescope, microscope and kaleidoscope all in one, if the laws of optics permit such an illustration. They give you the natural scenery of that country in a succession of landscapes fresh and splendid as any in the whole compass of literature, yet as topographically accurate as you will find in any geography or book of travels. They cause a crowded but exact and express image of the age and society of which they treat to pass before you as you see Moscow or Jerusalem or Mexico in a showman's box. They introduce genuine specimens,-real living men and women of every class and calling in society, as it was then constituted, and make them talk and act in character. You see their dress, their armor, and their weapons of war. You sit at their tables, you sleep under their roof-tree, you fish, hunt, and fowl with them. You follow them to their employments in field, forest, and workshop, you travel their roads, cross their rivers, worship with them at church, pledge them at the feast, and hear their war-cry in battle, and the coronach which announces and laments their fall. Time and space are thus annihilated by the power of genius. Instead of reading about a past age, you live in it. Instead of looking through a glass darkly at vast bodies in the distance,- at the separate, solitary glories of a sky beyond your reach,— wings as of the morning are given you: you ascend to that sky, and gaze on their unveiled present glories. It is as if you were placed in the streets of a city buried eighteen hundred years ago by the lava of a volcano, and saw it suddenly and completely disinterred, and its whole, various population raised in a moment to life in the same attitudes, clothed upon with the same bodies, wearing the same dresses, engaged in the same occupations, and warmed by the same passions, in which they perished! It would carry me too far to illustrate these thoughts by minute references to all Scott's poetry and romances, or to attempt to assort the particulars and sum up the aggregate of the real historical information for which we are indebted to that poetry and those romances. Go back, however, at random, to the age of Richard of the Lion Heart, the close of the twelfth century, the era of chivalry, the Crusades, and almost of Magna Charta. Read of it first in the acute and elegant Hume and the laborious Lingard; and then