IV. JOANNA’S CARE 545

of southern and foreign history then arranged itself for final review, it seemed to me that this space of low mountain ground, with the eternal sublimity of its rocky seashores, of its stormy seas and dangerous sands; its strange and mighty crags, Ailsa and the Bass, and its pathless moorlands, haunted by the driving cloud, had been of more import in the true world’s history than all the lovely countries of the South, except only Palestine. In my quite last journey to Venice¹ I was, I think, justly and finally impressed with the sadness and even weakness of the Mediterranean coasts; and the temptation to human nature, there, to solace itself with debasing pleasures; while the very impossibility of either accumulating the treasures, or multiplying the dreams, of art, among those northern waves and rocks, left the spirit of man strong to bear the hardships of the world, and faithful to obey the precepts of Heaven.

71. It is farther strange to me, even now, on reflection -to find how great the influence of this double ocean coast and Cheviot mountain border was upon Scott’s imagination; and how salutary they were in withdrawing him from the morbid German fancies which proved so fatal to Carlyle: but there was this grand original difference between the two, that, with Scott, his story-telling and singing were all in the joyful admiration of that past with which he could re-people the scenery he gave the working part of his day to traverse, and all the sensibility of his soul to love;* while

* Yet, remember, so just and intense is his perception, and so stern his condemnation, of whatever is corrupt in the Scottish character, that while of distinctly evil natures-Varney, Rashleigh, or Lord Dalgarno²-he takes world-wide examples,-the unpardonable baseness of so-called respectable or religious persons, and the cruelties of entirely selfish soldiers, are always Scotch. Take for the highest type of Lord Lindsay of The Abbot, and for the worst, Morton in The Monastery, then the terrible, because at first sincere, Balfour of Burleigh in Old Mortality; and in lower kind, the Andrew Fairservice and MacVittie of Rob Roy, the Peter Peebles of Redgauntlet, the Glossin of Guy Mannering, and the Saddletree of The Heart of Midlothian.

¹ [In October 1888: see the Introduction, above, p. xxxii.]

² [See Fiction, Fair and Foul, § 117 (Vol. XXXIV. p. 386).]

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