It is useless to moralise on this, and the purport and significance of it may be left for private meditation to enucleate and enjoy. But it cannot be fully appreciated, unless one remembers that the author of this and other charges against chivalry is also the historian of the feud between the Shepherdsons and the Grangerfords, equal in tragedy to the themes of the _chansons de geste_: of _Raoul de Cambrai_ or _Garin le Loherain_. Mark Twain in the person of Huckleberry Finn is committed to the ideas of chivalry neither more nor less than Walter Scott in _Ivanhoe_ or _The Talisman_. I am told further--though this is perhaps unimportant--that Gothic ornament in America is not peculiarly the taste of the South, that even at Chicago there are imitations of Gothic towers and halls. Hazlitt, an unbeliever in most of Scott's political principles, is also the most fervent and expressive admirer of the novels, quite beyond the danger of modern progress, his judgment not corrupted at all by the incense of the cotton-factory or the charm of the locomotive. Hazlitt's praise of Scott is an immortal proof of Hazlitt's sincerity in criticism. Scott's friends were not Hazlitt's, and Scott and Hazlitt differed both in personal and public affairs as much as any men of their time. But Hazlitt has too much sense not to be taken with the Scotch novels, and too much honesty not to say so, and too much spirit not to put all his strength into praising, when once he begins. Hazlitt's critical theory of Scott's novels is curiously like his opinion about Scott's old friend, the poet Crabbe: whose name I cannot leave without a salute to the laborious and eloquent work of M. Huchon, his scholarly French interpreter. Hazlitt on Crabbe and Scott is a very interesting witness on account of the principles and presuppositions employed by him. In the last hundred years or so the problems of realism and naturalism have been canvassed almost too thoroughly between disputants who seem not always to know when they are wandering from the point or wearying their audience with verbiage and platitudes. But out of all the controversy there has emerged at least one plain probability--that there is no such thing as simple transference of external reality into artistic form. This is what Hazlitt seems to ignore very strangely in his judgment of Crabbe and Scott, and this is, I think, an interesting point in the history of criticism, especially when it is remembered that Hazlitt was a critic of painting, and himself a painter. He speaks almost as if realities passed direct into the verse of Crabbe; as if Scott's imagination in the novels were merely recollection and transcription of experience. Speaking of the difference between the genius of Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott, he says: