Of the interest of the miscellaneous contents of the book, as including individual incidents in Scott’s life, sketches of the physiognomies and characters of his Edinburgh contemporaries and London contemporaries, descriptions of scenes and places, curious Scottish and other anecdotes, literary criticisms, and expressions of Scott’s opinions on public questions and on men and things in general, no adequate idea can be formed except from itself. As to Scott’s opinions on all the various questions, public or private, on which he had occasion to make up his mind and express what he felt, we may venture on one general remark. They are shrewd opinions, and often or generally just,—the judgments of a man of strong natural sagacity, and mature business-experience, adhering in the main to use and wont, but ready for an independent consideration of exigencies as they arose, and for any clear and safe improvement. Even in politics, though his partisanship in that department was obdurate, avowed, unflinching, and sometimes uproarious, his shrewdness in the forecast of what was possible, or his private determination in favour of what he thought just and desirable, led him sometimes,—especially where Scottish nationality was concerned, and the Thistle seemed to be insulted,—into dissent from his party, and the proclamation of opinions peculiarly his own. It is when we leave the plain ground of such practical and everyday questions, and either ascend to those higher levels, or descend to those deeper, at which the human intellect finds its powers more hardly tasked,—it is then that we observe what is usually reckoned a defect in Scott in comparison with many who have been far inferior to him in other intellectual respects. There was little in his mind of what may be called the purely _noetic_ organ, that faculty which speculates, investigates, deals with difficult problems of science or philosophy, and seeks in every subject for ultimate principles and a resting-ground of final conclusions. He either refrained from such exercises of mind entirely, or was content with proximate and easily accessible axioms. Even in literary criticism, where he might be supposed to have been most at home, it is sagacious _extempore_ judgments that he offers, honest expressions of his own immediate likings or dislikings, rather than suggestions or deductions from any code of reasoned principles. So in matters of higher and more solemn concern. From that simpler kind of philosophy which has been defined as a constant Meditation of Death Scott did not refrain, because no good or serious man can. There is evidence in his Journal that in his solitary hours he allowed himself often enough to lapse into this profoundest of meditations, and rolled through his mind the whole burthen of its everlasting mysteries. But the inscrutable for Scott, in this subject as in others, began at a short distance from his first cogitations or his inherited creed. “I would, if called upon, die a