and dramatic genius would ever have been his nothing indicates, but what writer of the nineteenth century, except Scott, has possessed a large share of these qualities? In poetry, not one, and it was in prose that Scott wore his fragment of the cloak of Shakespeare. For the century has not produced, in England or America, a great dramatic poet. It is to fiction, to Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Stevenson, Meredith, Hawthorne, George Eliot, that we must look for the humor and humanity and passion which, earlier, found their vehicle in the drama. Ours is a reading rather than a seeing century, though this does not explain the reason which made the great novelists incapable of writing for the stage. Of the other poets of the early century, Campbell, Rogers, Moore, Landor, Hogg, and the ladies, Mrs. Hemans, and L. E. L., and Beddoes, space does not permit us to treat. Landor’s audience has not increased; Rogers has none; Campbell is best remembered for war songs which I fear are overrated; Hogg, despite some exquisite passages in _Kilmeny_, and some admirable songs, suffers from his countrymen’s exclusive devotion to Robbie Burns. When Scott turned to fiction (1814) the current of popular taste at once changed into that channel. Byron had still his vogue; Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge then sang only to the few initiated; Wordsworth was past his prime; and with the general public nothing was really popular but fiction, and that fiction was Scott’s. Miss Austen is probably much more widely appreciated to-day than when she died, little noted by the world, in 1817. A criticism of Scott’s novels, which first made fiction supreme and far above poetry in the estimation of “the reading public,” cannot be attempted in this place. The best estimate of Scott, if far from most favorable, is his own, in the introduction to _The Fortunes of Nigel_. His faults of prolixity, haste, indifference to delicacy of style, and even to grammar; his “big bow-wow” vein (as he calls it); the stilted theatrical language of his Catherine Glovers and Helen Macgregors—all these defects, with his hasty denouéments (as of Shakespeare and Molière), are patent, are confessed, and probably deter many readers from making profit of his humor, his rich knowledge of and sympathy with all human nature, his infrequent but exquisite touches of passion, his tragedy and comedy. None the less, Scott is the main stock of the fiction of the century. Men may now have more minute knowledge, though so wide a knowledge has none; may have more wit, if less humor; may eagerly hunt for all that Scott loathed and avoided in our animal nature; may, indeed must, practise a more careful style, but all the novelists are, willy-nilly, children of Scott and Miss Austen. Dickens, indeed, owed more to Smollett (one of Scott’s chief favorites), Thackeray owed more to Fielding, the “Kailyard School” owed more to Galt (1779—1839). But Scott is “the father of the rest,” above all,