been one of the most popular of all abroad, and not the least so at home; and there are critics who rank _Anne of Geierstein_, in 1829, very high indeed. Few defenders are found for _Count Robert of Paris_, which was in fact written in the valley of the shadow; and it may be admitted that in his earlier days Scott would certainly have been able to give it a fuller development and a livelier turn. Yet the opening scene, though a little too long, the escape from the vaults of the Blachernal, and not a few other things, would be recognised as marvellous if they could be put before a competent but unbiassed taste, which knew nothing of Sir Walter's other work, but was able to compare it not merely with the work of his predecessors but with that of his imitators, numerous and enterprising as they were, at the time that _Count Robert_ appeared. In such a comparison Scott at his worst excels all others at their best. It is not merely that in this detail and in that he has the mastery, but that he has succeeded in making novel writing in general turn over a completely new leaf, enter upon a distinctly different competition. With the masterpieces of the eighteenth century novel he does not enter into comparison at all: he is working on a different scene, addressing a different audience, using different tools, colours, methods. Every successful novelist up to his time had, whatever his ostensible "_temp._ of tale," quietly assumed the thoughts, the speech, the manners, even to a great extent the dress and details of his own day. And in this assumption all but the greatest had inevitably estranged from them the ears and eyes of days that were not their own, which days, no doubt, were in turn themselves rapidly hastening to change, but never to revert to the original surroundings. Scott had done in prose fiction what the poets and the dramatists had sometimes done, what very rare philosophers had sometimes done likewise. Ostensibly going to the past, and to some extent really borrowing its circumstances, he had in reality gone straight to man as man; he had varied the particular trapping only to exhibit the universal substance. The Baron of Bradwardine, Dandie Dinmont, Edie Ochiltree, Mause Headrigg, Bailie Jarvie, and the long list of originals down to Oliver Proudfute and even later, their less eccentric companions from Fergus MacIvor to Queen Margaret, may derive part of their appeal from dialect and colouring, from picturesque "business" and properties. But the chief of that appeal lies in the fact that they are all men and women of the world, of life, of time in general; that even when their garments, even when their words are a little out of fashion, there is real flesh and blood beneath the garments, real thought and feeling behind the words. It may be urged by the Devil's Advocate, and is not wholly susceptible of denial by his opponent, that, after the first four or five books, the enormous gains