the half-crazed preaching of Peter down to the Fall of Jerusalem.
Those leaders! It would take a second Homer to do them justice.
Godfrey the perfect soldier and leader, Bohemund the unscrupulous
and formidable, Tancred the ideal knight errant, Robert of Normandy
the half-mad hero! Here is material so rich that one feels one is
not worthy to handle it. What richest imagination could ever evolve
anything more marvellous and thrilling than the actual historical
facts?

But what a glorious brotherhood the novels are! Think of the pure
romance of "The Talisman"; the exquisite picture of Hebridean life
in "The Pirate"; the splendid reproduction of Elizabethan England
in "Kenilworth"; the rich humour of the "Legend of Montrose"; above
all, bear in mind that in all that splendid series, written in a
coarse age, there is not one word to offend the most sensitive car,
and it is borne in upon one how great and noble a man was Walter
Scott, and how high the service which he did for literature and
for humanity.

For that reason his life is good reading, and there it is on the
same shelf as the novels. Lockhart was, of course, his son-in-law
and his admiring friend. The ideal biographer should be a perfectly
impartial man, with a sympathetic mind, but a stern determination to
tell the absolute truth. One would like the frail, human side of a
man as well as the other. I cannot believe that anyone in the world
was ever quite so good as the subject of most of our biographies.
Surely these worthy people swore a little sometimes, or had a keen
eye for a pretty face, or opened the second bottle when they would
have done better to stop at the first, or did something to make us
feel that they were men and brothers. They need not go the length