Indeed, when we have gone as far as we please in denouncing shams, ridiculing men in buff-jerkins, and the whole Wardour Street business of gimcrack and Brummagem antiquities, it still remains true that Scott's great service was what we may call the vivification of history. He made us feel, it is generally said, as no one had ever made us feel before, that the men of the past were once real human beings; and I can agree if I am permitted to make a certain distinction. His best service, I should say, was not so much in showing us the past as it was when it was present; but in showing us the past as it is really still present. His knights and crusaders and feudal nobles are after all unreal, and the best critics felt even in his own day that his greatest triumphs were in describing the Scottish peasantry of his time. Dandie Dinmont and Jeanie Deans and their like are better than many Front de Boeufs and Robin Hoods. It is in dealing with his own contemporaries that he really shows the imaginative insight which entitles him to be called a great creator as well as an amusing story-teller. But this, rightly stated, is not inconsistent with the previous statement. For the special characteristic of Scott as distinguished from his predecessors is precisely his clear perception that the characters whom he loved so well and described so vividly were the products of a long historical evolution. His patriotism was the love of a country in which everything had obvious roots in its previous history. The stout farmer Dinmont was the descendant of the old borderers; the Deanses were survivals from the days of the Covenanters or of John Knox; every peculiarity upon which he delighted to dwell was invested with all the charm of descent from a long and picturesque history. When Fielding describes the squires or lawyers of the eighteenth century, he says nothing to show that he was even aware of the existence of a seventeenth, or still less of a sixteenth century. Scott can describe no character without assigning to it its place in the social organism which has been growing up since the earliest dawn of history. This was, of course, no accident. He came at the time when the little provincial centres were just feeling the first invasion of the great movements from without. Edinburgh, whether quite comparable to Athens or not, had been for two or three generations a remarkable centre of intellectual cultivation. Hume and Adam Smith were only the most conspicuous members of a society which monopolised pretty well all the philosophy which existed in the island and a great deal of the history and criticism. In Scott's time the patriotic feeling which had been a blind instinct was becoming more or less self-conscious. The literary society in which Scott was leader of the Tories, and Jeffrey of the Whigs, included a large proportion of the best intellect of the time and was sufficiently in contact with the outside world to be conscious of its own characteristics.