_By the Author of "Eugene Aram."_


The blow is struck--the lyre is shattered--the music is hushed at
length. The greatest--the most various--the most commanding genius of
modern times has left us to seek for that successor to his renown which,
in all probability, a remote generation alone will furnish forth. It is
true that we have been long prepared for the event--it does not fall
upon us suddenly--leaf after leaf was stripped from that noble tree
before it was felled to the earth at last;--our sympathy in his decay
has softened us to the sorrow for his death. It is not now our intention
to trace the character or to enumerate the works of the great man whose
career is run;--to every eye that reads--every ear that hears--every
heart that remembers, this much at least, of his character is already
known,--that he had all the exuberance of genius and none of its
excesses; that he was at once equitable and generous--that his heart was
ever open to charity--that his life has probably been shortened by his
scrupulous regard for justice. His career was one splendid refutation of
the popular fallacy, that genius has of necessity vices--that its light
must be meteoric--and its courses wayward and uncontrolled. He has left
mankind two great lessons,--we scarcely know which is the most valuable.
He has taught us how much delight one human being can confer upon the
world; he has taught us also that the imagination may aspire to the
wildest flights without wandering into error. Of whom else among our
great list of names--the heir-looms of our nation--can we say that he
has left us everything to admire, and nothing to forgive?

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)