It is in four different paths of intellectual eminence that Sir Walter Scott has won his fame; as a poet, a biographer, an historian, and a novellist. It is not now a time (with the great man's clay scarce cold) to enter into the niceties of critical discussion. We cannot now weigh, and sift, and compare. We feel too deeply at this moment to reason well---but we ourselves would incline to consider him greatest as a poet. Never, indeed, has there been a poet so thoroughly Homeric as Scott--the battle--the feast--the council--the guard-room at Stirling--the dying warrior at Flodden--the fierce Bertram speeding up the aisle--all are Homeric;--all live--move--breathe and burn--alike poetry, but alike life! There is this difference, too, marked and prominent--between his verse and his prose;--the first is emphatically the verse of Scott--the latter (we mean in its style) may be the prose of any one--the striking originality, the daring boldness, the astonishing vigour of the style, in the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_, are lost in _The Antiquary and Guy Mannering_. Scott may be said, in prose, to have _no style_. There are those, we know, who call this very absence of style a merit--we will not dispute it: if it be so, Scott is the first great prose writer from Bacon to Gibbon,--nay, from Herodotus, in Greek, to Paul Courier, in French--who has laid claim to it. For our own part, we think him great, in spite of the want of style, and not because of it. As a biographer, he has been unfortunate in his subjects; the two most important of the various lives he has either delineated or sketched--that of Dryden and that of Swift--are men, to whose inexpiable baseness genius could neither give the dignity of virtue nor the interest of error. As an historian, we confess that we prize him more highly than as a biographer: it is true that the same faults are apparent in both, but there is in the grand History of Napoleon more scope for redeeming beauties. His great, his unrivalled, excellence in description is here brought into full and ample display: his battles are vivid, with colours which no other historian ever could command. And all the errors of the history still leave scenes and touches of unrivalled majesty to the book.