had done before him) and fancies he has written an English Grammar; and divines applaud, and schoolmasters usher him into the polite world, and English scholars carry on the jest, while Horne Tooke’s genuine anatomy of our native tongue is laid on the shelf.  Can it be that our politicians smell a rat in the Member for Old Sarum?  That our clergy do not relish Parson Horne?  That the world at large are alarmed at acuteness and originality greater than their own?  What has all this to do with the formation of the English language or with the first conditions and necessary foundation of speech itself?  Is there nothing beyond the reach of prejudice and party-spirit?  It seems in this, as in so many other instances, as if there was a patent for absurdity in the natural bias of the human mind, and that folly should be stereotyped!

[Footnote A:  “They receive him like a virgin at the Magdalen—­Go thou and do likewise.”—­JUNIUS.]

[Footnote B:  This work is not without merit in the details and examples of English construction.  But its fault even in that part is that he confounds the genius of the English language, making it periphrastic and literal, instead of elliptical and idiomatic.  According to Mr. Murray, hardly any of our best writers ever wrote a word of English.]

[Footnote C:  At least, with only one change in the genitive case,]

* * * * *

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 the human intellect is capable of being:  if you take the universe, and divide it into two parts, he knows all that it has 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 prejudice.  The land of pure reason is to his apprehension like Van Dieman’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 five hundred years ago, and then he would want facts and worm-eaten