But our chief disablement for high creative work,--and one that is particularly noticeable at this immediate period of our history, is, as I have said, the “vanishing of the gift”--the lack of Imagination. To be wanting in this, is to be wanting in the first element of artistic greatness. The poet, the painter, the sculptor, or the musician must be able to make a world of his own and live in it, before he can make one for others. When he has evolved such a world out of his individual consciousness, and has peopled it with the creations of his fancy, he can turn its “airy substance” into reality for all time. For the things we call “imaginative” are often far more real than what we call “realism.” All that we touch, taste and see, we call “real.” Now we cannot touch, taste or see Honour--but surely it is real! We cannot weigh out Courage in a solidified parcel--yet it is an actual thing. So with Imagination--it shows us what we may, if we choose, consider “the baseless fabric of a vision”--but which often proves as real and practical in its results as Honour and Courage. Shakespeare’s world is real;--so real that there are not wanting certain literary imposters who grudge him its reality and strive to dispossess him of his own. Walter Scott’s world is real--so real, that a shrine has been built for him in Edinburgh, crowded with sculptured figures of men and women, most of whom never existed, save in his teeming fancy. What a tribute to the power of Imagination is the beautiful monument in the centre of Princes Street, with all the forms evoked from one great mind, lifted high above us, who consider ourselves “real” people! And now the lesser world of thought is waiting for the discovery of a Cryptogram in the Waverley Novels, which shall prove that King George the Fourth wrote them with the assistance of Scott’s game-keeper, Tom Purdie,--and that his Majesty gave Scott a baronetcy on condition that he should never divulge the true authorship! For, according to the narrow material limits of some latter-day minds, no one man could possibly have written Shakespeare’s Plays. Therefore it may be equally argued that, as there is as much actual work, and quite as many characters in the Waverley Novels as in the plays of Shakespeare, they could not all have emanated from the one brain of Sir Walter Scott. Come forward then with a “Waverley cryptogram,” little mean starvelings of literature who would fain attempt to prove a man’s work is not his own! There are sure to be some envious fools always ready to believe that the great are not so great,--the heroic not so heroic, and that after all, they, the fools, may be wiser than the wisest men!