Here in Hollywood we see these magic castles arise on the movie lots; we see the costumes reproduced with minute exactitude, and then surmounting them we see the heads of screen dolls, male and female, lounge lizards and jazz dancers and queens from department stores and manicure parlors. And just so it is in the novels of Sir Walter: the costumes and scenery are those of old-time Scotland, but the characters are the gentlemen and servants and tenants of Scott’s own neighborhood. He had creative energy and a sense of humor, he makes the game very real, and we can enjoy it, provided we know what we are getting. It is not even Scott’s own time, it is merely the Tory propaganda of that time. It is medievalism and absolutism dressed up and glorified, with every trace of blood and filth and horror wiped away; a fictionized sermon upon the text: Vote the Conservative ticket. But alas for the dreams of stand-pat poets! First came the ruin of his personal hopes. Among the rascals of his gang were two who persuaded him into a publishing business, to reap the millions out of his popularity. They stole everything in sight, and then went bankrupt, and left him at the age of fifty-five with a debt of a hundred and seventeen thousand pounds. He set to work to write pot-boilers and pay it off; an action which has made him a hero to his biographers. And of course, it is an honorable thing for an artist to pay his debts; we all know that most disagreeable of characters, the Bohemian genius who borrows from everybody he meets and repays nothing. But it seems necessary to point out that a novelist owes two debts; one to his business creditors, and the other to those who are to read his books in future time. We are not satisfied with Sir Walter’s pot-boilers, and we deny that a man of genius has a right to drive himself to death and bring on a stroke of paralysis in four years, in order to satisfy a romantic dream of honor. Equally pitiful was the wreck of Sir Walter’s political ideals. In vain did he glorify the loyalty of the Scotch peasants, their fidelity to their lairds; in vain was all his hounding of the rebellious weavers with the weapons of the law. They continued to organize, and the peasants began to mutter and snarl; they wanted the vote, they clamored for rights both political and economic. A most wicked project known as the Reform Bill came up before Parliament, to give the vote to common working people; and Sir Walter, sixty years old and ill, persisted in taking part in the campaign. He made a speech in which he warned the audience that all these licentious movements came from France. This was forty years after the French revolution, and the Bolshevik bogie had lost its power to terrify; Sir Walter was hissed by his audience. Later on he personally saw to the arrest of a radical rascal on the street, and got himself stoned and mobbed. It was a shock he never got over, and he carried the memory to his grave a year or two later.