age, and capable of acting _immediately_ and widely on that age, must of necessity _reflect_ the age in the first instance, though as far as he is a man of genius, he will doubtless be himself reflected by it reciprocally. Now I selected Scott for the very reason, that I do hold him for a man of _very extraordinary_ powers; and when I say that I have read the far greater part of his novels twice, and several three times over, with undiminished pleasure and interest; and that, in my reprobation of the _Bride of Lammermoor_ (with the exception, however, of the almost Shakspearian old witch-wives at the funeral) and of the _Ivanhoe_, I mean to imply the grounds of my admiration of the others, and the permanent nature of the interest which they excite. In a word, I am far from thinking that _Old Mortality_ or _Guy Mannering_ would have been less admired in the age of Sterne, Fielding, and Richardson, than they are in the present times; but only that Sterne, etc., would not have had the same _immediate_ popularity in the present day as in their own less stimulated and, therefore, less languid reading world. Of Sir Walter Scott's poems I cannot speak so highly, still less of the Poetry in his _Poems_; though even in these the power of presenting the most numerous figures, and figures with the most complex movements, and under rapid succession, in _true picturesque unity_, attests true and peculiar genius. You cannot imagine with how much pain I used, many years ago, to hear ----'s contemptuous assertions respecting Scott; and if I mistake not, I have yet the fragments of the rough draft of a letter written by me so long ago as my first lectures at the London Philosophical Society, Fetter Lane, and on the backs of the unused admission tickets.