Midway in time between Richardson and Dickens stands the king of romantics, Scott, and he, too, is a realist in his depiction of Scottish life and character. In “The Bride of Lammermoor” so melodramatic and “stagey” that it seems to be set behind footlights and played to music--a familiar opera is based upon it--there is one character that Scott found not in legend or history, but in the life he knew, Caleb Balderstone. Like the gravedigger in “Hamlet,” he is a link between unusual, we might fairly say unnatural, events and common humanity. In many of Scott’s novels, beside the strutting heroes that startle the world in high astounding terms, walk the soldiers, servants, parsons, shepherds, who by their presence make us feel that it is the firm earth upon which the action moves. Argument among critics as to the nature of romance and realism helps, as all questions of definition may help, to make us understand the relation of one novel to another and to see the range and purpose of fiction. But that any one should say of two novels that one is better than the other, simply because it is more realistic or more romantic, is to impose a technicality on enjoyment with which enjoyment refuses to be burdened. Who that picks up a novel for the pleasure of reading it cares whether it is romance or realism? So long as it has vitality of its own kind, and gives us enough of the many virtues which a novel may possess, we are content to plunge into it and ask no questions. A lily is not a rose; it takes no great wisdom to know that; the botanists will tell us the exact difference, and the gardener will tell us how they grow; but if botanist or horticulturist tells us which is more beautiful, we listen to his opinion and keep our own. Mr. Kipling’s “Kim,” or Mr. Howells’s “A Modern Instance”; “Far from the Madding Crowd,” by Thomas Hardy, or Scott’s “Ivanhoe”; Stevenson’s “Kidnapped,” or Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn”--which of these books is realistic and which is the other kind? Suppose you read them to find out. In the midst of any one of them you will have forgotten the question, because the novelist will have filled your whole mind with other--and more important--interests.