The Wizard of the North, as it was the custom a few years ago to call Walter Scott, may be regarded in four aspects—as a novelist, a poet, a critic, and a historian. In the first character he was unequaled, in the second and third among the first of his age and country, and in the last, alone, utterly contemptible; and that not for lack of ability or painstaking, certainly, but on account of his perfect recklessness of all principle, truth or decency that did not tend to fill his pockets with money or advance the interests of his party. In the volumes before us we have his criticisms and miscellaneous essays, and though we had aforetime been accustomed to regard them as possessing comparatively slight merit, a reperusal of the greater number has left on our mind an impression in the highest degree favorable to them, as compared with the best productions of their kind. Macauley is our favorite reviewer; Wilson, Sidney Smith, Talfourd and Scott we rank next. With all his apparent rapidity and ease, Macauley is the most laborious of the fraternity. He spends his month in reading—_cramming_ is the technical phrase—everything relating to his subject; sits for a week or two at his desk, writing, recurring to documents, and rewriting, until every fact or idea he deems worthy of retention is embodied in his article, which is then carefully retouched and copied for the “Edinburgh.” Talfourd meditates his subject, too, and polishes with no less care or skill. But Scott glanced upon the surface of things, skimmed over the abstracts and summaries relating to his theme, and wrote off, in his smooth, vivacious, pleasant way, his paper—read the MS—marked in a few commas and colons—and sent it to the printer. With too little time and space for an elaborate review of these volumes, yet anxious, as in all our notices of books, to give the reader a definite idea of their character, we place in the margin a list of their contents, and shall notice more particularly but a small number of the forty-eight articles of which they are composed. The essays on Chatterton and Burns, in the first volume, are sympathizing, liberal and judicious, though less distinguished for nicety of discrimination than some others on the same subjects. In the second volume is his review of his own “Tales of My Landlord,” from the _Quarterly_, for January, 1817, educed by a series of essays from the pen of Doctor McCrie, in which the views given of the Scottish covenanters in the Waverly novels were bitterly impugned. The authorship of these novels, it will be remembered, was then a secret. The modesty of Scott’s estimate of himself may be inferred from the following passage, from page 144: