lordly prelates, grim inquisitors, abbots, priors, and priests of all descriptions, but all somewhat conventional and viewed ab extra.  He could not draw a saint.[47] Significant, therefore, is his indifference to Dante, the poet par excellence of the Catholic Middle Age, the epitomizer of mediaeval thought.  “The plan” of the “Divine Comedy,” “appeared to him unhappy; the personal malignity and strange mode of revenge presumptuous and uninteresting.”  Scott’s genius was antipathetic to Dante’s; and he was as incapable of taking a lasting imprint from his intense, austere, and mystical spirit, as from the nebulous gloom of the Ossianic poetry.  Though conservative, he was not reactionary after the fashion of the German “throne-and-altar” romanticists, but remained always a good Church of England man and an obstinate opponent of Catholic emancipation.[48] “Creeds are data in his novels,” says Bagehot; “people have different creeds but each keeps his own.”

Scott’s interest in popular superstitions was constant.  As a young man—­in his German ballad period—­they affected his imagination with a “pleasing horror.”  But as he grew older, they engaged him less as a poet than as a student of Cultur geschichte.

A wistful sense of the beauty of these old beliefs—­a rational smile at their absurdity—­such is the tone of his “Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft” (1830), a passage or two from which will give his attitude very precisely; an attitude, it will be seen, which is after all not so very different from Addison’s, allowing for the distance in time and place, and for Scott’s livelier imagination.[49] Scott had his laugh at Mrs. Radcliffe, and in his reviews of Hoffmann’s “Tales” and Maturin’s “Fatal Revenge” [50] he insists upon the delicacy with which the supernatural must be treated in an age of disbelief.  His own management of such themes, however, though much superior to Walpole’s or Mrs. Radcliffe’s, has not the subtle art of Coleridge.  The White Lady of Avenel, e.g., in “The Abbot,” is a notorious failure.  There was too much daylight in his imagination for spectres to be quite at home.  “The shapes that haunt thought’s wildernesses”; the “night side of things”; the real shudder are not there, as in Hawthorne or in Poe.  Walter Pater[51] says that Meinhold’s “Amber Witch” has more of the true romantic spirit than Tieck, who was its professional representative.  On the contrary, it has less of the romantic spirit, but more of the mediaeval fact.  It is a literal, realistic handling of the witch superstition, as Balzac’s “Succube,” in the “Contes Drolatiques” is a satirical version of similar material.  But Tieck’s “Maerchen” are the shadows thrown by mediaeval beliefs across a sensitive, modern imagination, and are in result, therefore, romantic.  Scott’s dealing with subjects of the kind is midway between Meinhold and Tieck.  He does not blink the ugly, childish, stupid, and cruel features of popular superstition, but throws the romantic glamour over them, precisely as he does over his “Charlie over the water” Jacobites.[52]