With the lesson in our minds which this little story supplies, we may return to the matter of Scott’s reputed deficiency in the speculative or purely noetic faculty:—Noetic faculty! Noetic fiddlestick! This faculty, with a score of others perhaps for which our meagre science of mind has no names, you will find in Scott too, if you know how to look for them. When and where would you have looked for the noetic faculty in Nelson? Not, certainly, as he was to be seen in common life, a little man of slouching gait, with his empty right arm-sleeve pinned to his breast, and gravely propounding as an unanswerable argument in his own experience for the immateriality of the soul the fact that, though there was now an interval of half a yard from the stump of his lost arm and the place where his fingers had been, he could still sometimes feel twitches of rheumatism in those merely spectral finger-tips. No! but see him on his own great wooden three-decker, as he was taking her into action between the enemy’s lines, when the battle-roar and the battle-flashes had brought the electric shiver through his veins, and he stood among his sailors transmuted into the real Nelson, seamanship incarnate and a fighting demigod! So, with the necessary difference for the purpose now in view, in the case of Scott. His various faculties of intellect were involved inextricably somehow in that imaginative faculty which he did possess, and also in enormous degree, in common with Shakespeare. When Scott was engaged on any of his greater works,—a _Lay of the Last Minstrel_, a _Marmion_, a _Lady of the Lake_, a _Waverley_, a _Guy Mannering_, an _Antiquary_, an _Old Mortality_, a _Heart of Midlothian_, an _Ivanhoe_, or a _Redgauntlet_,—when he was so engaged, and when the poetic phrenzy had seized him strongly,—then what happened? Why, then that imaginative faculty which seemed to be the whole of him, or the best of him, revealed itself somehow as not a single faculty, but a complex composition of various faculties, some of them usually dormant. This it did by visibly splitting itself, resolving itself, into the multiplicity of which it was composed; and then the plain everyday man of the tall upright head, sagacious face, and shaggy eyebrows, was transmuted, even to his own surprise, into a wizard that could range and speculate,—range and speculate incalculably. It was, I say, as if then there were loosened within him, out of his one supposed faculty of phantasy, a simultaneous leash of other faculties, a noetic faculty included, that could spring to incredible distances from his ordinary self, each pursuing its appropriate prey, finding it, seizing it, sporting with it, and coiling it back obediently to the master’s feet. In some such way, I think, must be explained the splendour of the actual achievements of Scott’s genius, the moderate dimensions of his purely reasoning energy in all ordinary circumstances notwithstanding. His