excepted--who invited our thorough and uncondescending sympathy to the
wide mass of the human family--who has _stricken_ (for in this
artificial world it requires an effort) into our hearts a love and a
respect for those chosen from the people. Shakspeare has not done
this--Shakspeare paints the follies of the mob with a strong and
unfriendly hand. Where, in Skakspeare, is there a Jeanie Deans? Take up
which you will of those numerous works which have appeared, from
_Waverley_ to the _Chronicles of the Canongate_,--open where
you please, you will find portraits from the people--and your interest
keeping watch beside the poor man's hearth. Not, in Scott, as they were
in the dramatists of our language, are the peasant, the artificer, the
farmer, dragged on the stage merely to be laughed at for their brogue,
and made to seem ridiculous because they are useful.

He paints them, it is true, in their natural language, but the language
is subservient to the character; he does not bow the man to the phrase,
but the phrase to the man. Neither does he flatter on the one hand, as
he does not slight on the other. Unlike the maudlin pastoralists of
France he contents himself with the simple truth--he contrasts the dark
shadows of Meg Merrilies, or of Edie Ochiltree, with the holy and pure
lights that redeem and sanctify them--he gives us the poor, even to the
gipsey and the beggar, as they really are--contented, if our interest is
excited, and knowing that nature is sufficient to excite it. From the
palaces of kings--from the tents of warriors, he comes--equally at home
with man in all aspects--to the cotter's hearth:--he bids us turn from
the pomp of the Plantagenets to bow the knee to the poor Jew's
daughter--he makes us sicken at the hollowness of the royal Rothsay, to
sympathize with the honest love of Hugh the smith. No never was there
one--not even Burns himself--who forced us more intimately to
acknowledge, or more deeply to feel, that