When will Cockney revilers learn that Scotland is not all thrift, caution, and kailyard prose, but a nation showing two main strains, which Mr. John Morley suggests as the explanation of Gladstone’s complex character? One component may be hard, practical, frugal, in politics tending to democracy, in religion to logic; but this has been crossed by a spirit, better bred in the romantic Highlands, that is generous, proud, quick-tempered, reckless, reverent towards the past, rather than eager for progress. The painter of Scottish life must recognise how Fitz-James and Roderick Dhu are countrymen with Bailie Nicol Jarvie and Andrew Fairservice, how Flora MacIvor is not less a Scotswoman than Mause Headrigg or Jenny Dennison, and how the Jacobite and the Presbyterian enthusiasm smacked of the same soil. If one shut one’s eye to half the case, it would be easy to make out that rash impetuosity flourished beyond the Tweed rather than the thistly prudence taken for a more congenial crop. Scott comprehended both of these elements. By birth and training he belonged to the Saxon, by sympathy to the Celt. If his father was a douce Edinburgh “writer,” one of his forebears had been that “Beardie” who bound himself never to shave till the Stuarts came back to their own. Brought up under the dry light of the Revolution Settlement, in his reminiscences of childhood he transforms a worthy parish minister into a “Venerable Priest,” and in later life he came to be himself little better than an Episcopalian. It may be owned he had no more religion than became a Cavalier; even the romance of superstition did not take much hold on him, and that rhyming “White Lady” has not even a ghostly life on his page. His favourite heroes are the like of Montrose and Claverhouse, yet he can do justice to the stern virtues of the Covenanters. In the sober historian mood he duly warns his grandchild how life was galled and fettered in the good old days, which he was too willing to see _couleur de rose_ when their picturesque incidents offered themselves to the romancer. He turns a blind eye, perhaps, too much on the faults of knights and princes, yet he knows the worth of ploughmen and fisherfolk, and into Halbert Glendinning’s and Henry Morton’s mouths he puts sentiments to which John Bright or Cobden might say amen. He is happiest, indeed, in the past, when “the wrath of our ancestors was coloured _gules_,” whereas we have learned, like Mr. Trulliber’s wife, to be Christians and take the law of our enemies. His appetite for imaginary bloodshed is a sore offence to writers like Mark Twain, who appear less scandalised that a pork-baron, a corn-lord, or a cotton-king should plot to be rich by starving children on the other side of the world. But Scott’s very failings reflect the character of his countrymen, who, Highland and Lowland, have been mighty fighters before the Lord on a much wider field than from Berwick to John o’ Groat’s House.