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The Miscellaneous Works of William Hazlitt
The Miscellaneous Works of William Hazlitt Author:William Hazlitt Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SIR WALTER SCOTT. Sir Walter. Scott is undoubtedly the most popular writer of the age—the " lord of the ascendant" for the time being. He is just half what th... more »e human intellect is capable of being : if you take the universe, and divide it into two parts, he knows all that it Arts been ; all that it is to be is nothing to him. His is a mind brooding over antiquity—scorning " the present ignorant time." He is " laudator temporis acti"—a "prophesier of things past." The old world is to him a crowded map; the new one a dull, hateful blank. He dotes on all well-authenticated superstitions; he shudders at the shadow of innovation. His retentiveness of memory, his accumulated weight of interested prejudice or romantic association have overlaid his other faculties. The cells of his memory are vast, various, full even to bursting with life and motion ; his speculative understanding is empty, flaccid, poor, and dead. His mind receives and treasures up every thing brought to it by tradition or custom—it does not project itself beyond this into the world unknown, but mechanically shrinks back as from the edge of a precipice. The land of pure reason is to his apprehension like Van Die-man's Land;—barren, miserable, distant, a place of exile, the dreary abode of savages, convicts, and adventurers. Sir Walter would make a bad hand of a description of the Millennium, unless he could lay the scene in Scotland fivehundred years ago, and then he would want facts and worm-eaten parchments to support his drooping style. Our historical novelist firmly thinks that nothing is but what has been—that the moral world stands still, as ihe material one was supposed to do of old—and that we can never get beyond the point where we actually are without utter destruction, though every thing changes and will cha...« less