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