martyr for the Christian Religion,” he writes once in his Diary; and no one can doubt that the words were written with the most earnest sincerity. But, when we interpret them duly by the light of other passages, and of all that we know independently, it is as if we saw Scott standing upright with flushed face and clenched hands, and saying to those about him who might want to trouble him too much on so sacred a subject,—“This is the faith that has been transmitted to us from far-back generations; this is the faith in which millions of abler men than I am, or than you are, have lived and died; I hold by that faith, without seeking too curiously to define it or to discuss its several tenets; and, if you come too near me, to pester me with your doubts and questionings, and new inquiries and speculations, and all the rest of your clever nineteenth-century metaphysics, I warn you that the soul of all my fathers will rise in me, and I shall become dangerous.” In plainer words, on this subject, as on others, it was in Scott’s constitution to rest in that kind of wisdom which declines thinking beyond a certain distance. Here, again, and in a new connection, we come round to Shakespeare. In _him_, no one needs to be reminded, the noetic faculty existed in dimensions absolutely enormous, working wonderfully in conjunction with his equally enormous faculty of imagination, and yet with the incessant alertness, the universal aggressiveness, and the self-enjoying mobility, of a separate mental organ. Hence those glances from heaven to earth and to the underworld which earth conceals, those shafts of reasoned insight into the roots of all things, those lightning gleams of speculation to its last extreme, that wealth of maxims of worldly prudence outrivalling and double-distilling the essence of all that is in Bacon’s Essays, those hints and reaches towards an ultimate philosophy both of nature and of human life, which have made Shakespeare’s writings till now, and will make them henceforth, a perennial amazement. Well, after what has just been said of Scott, are we bound, on this account, to give up the customary juxtaposition of the two men? Hardly so, I think; for there is a consideration of some importance yet in reserve. I will introduce it by a little anecdote taken from the Journal itself.