around him speaks of Scott. Go where you will, turn in whichever direction, his name seems to sanctify and hallow everything. I have read in your last annual report, and to my intense amazement, that it requires the efforts of the Society to induce the schoolboys of Edinburgh to read Walter Scott's works. I can hardly believe it. No, I will not believe it. Why, in America he finds hundreds of thousands of readers every year. The press teems with new editions, and every educated man is supposed to be, and is really, familiar with his leading poems and romances. When we come here we do not come as strangers. He has made us feel at home, more at home in Edinburgh than in any other city of Europe. There is not any other city, not even Rome itself, that has become so familiar to Americans who have never seen it, than this beautiful city of yours, and all thanks to the marvellous descriptions of this your beloved poet and novelist.

So, when we come here, we come, as it were, as pilgrims to visit shrines that he has made familiar in story; to the haunts and homes of his heroes and heroines; to Arthur's Seat and Holyrood; to his own professional and personal places; to Abbotsford, the sad memorial of his tragic struggle, and Dryburgh Abbey, where his sacred dust reposes, while his spirit still walks abroad among all English speaking peoples, to fill them with love of Scotland, its history, its scenery and its people. Carlyle has said, after nobly describing Scott as the pride of all Scotsmen, giving him credit for

an open soul—a wide, far reaching soul— that carried him out in absolute sympathy with all human things and people; after giving him credit for that wonderful and innate love of the beauty of nature and the power of describing it, and his infinite sympathy with man as well as with nature, he has, in one of his most acrid utterances, said that if literature has no other task than pleasantly to amuse indolent, languid men, why here in Scott was the perfection of literature. Well, now, for one, I must confess that every now and then, I am one of those indolent, languid men, and as I look along these tables, if I rightly study your characters and moods, I suspect that this is a great group of those indolent, languid men, who believe that it is not the only task, but that it is one of the most valuable tasks of literature to amuse and to entertain mankind.

I have often thought that I would rather have been the author of one such book as Waverley, or Kenilworth, or Henry Esmond, or Romola, than to achieve any other kind of personal, professional or public fame. The good that these books do us, the rest they give us, the enjoyment they yield us among the hundreds of millions who read the language in which they are written, is absolutely infinite, and the fame that the author of such a book wins rivals, if it does not outshine, all other kinds of fame.

Look at it now! Waverley was written in 1814, a memorable event in the history of British literature; the battle of Waterloo was fought in the

next year, one of the great critical battles of all human history. Eighty-five years have gone by since then, and which name is now dearer to mankind? Which one now enjoys the wider and the better fame, Wellington or Walter Scott? I shall not answer that question. I leave every man to answer it for himself.

So much has been said about Walter Scott tonight that I will not tell you all I wish to say about him. I would like to recall just four points of his character, which are the dearest to me in it all — his humanity, his cleanliness, his heroic industry and his patriotism.

His humanity! He was the most humane of men, with the sunniest of souls in the soundest of bodies, and with a cheerful and happy temperament which is always worth millions to its possessor. What would not Carlyle have given for a share of it? He loved God and he loved man, and what more can you say? His heart went out to all his fellow men and theirs in turn came back to him. Everybody loved him. Even the dumb animals fawned at his feet, and it was this intense, everloving and glowing humanity that was in his heart that made him as he was in his day and generation, the most popular man in all the world.

Well, this humanity was godliness, and it is the old proverb that "cleanliness is next to godliness." Now, to have written so much, to have found so many millions of readers, to have found his way in every family, in every land that reads

at all, and yet not one word in the whole, not one word that he, dying, would wish to erase, not one false suggestion, not one double meaning, not a single thought or suggestion that could bring a blush to the cheek of the most innocent and delicate reader. This ought not to be high praise, but it is high praise when you recall some modern novels, not French only, but some English, which have brought fame and profit to their authors, which find their way into every family upon the plea that everybody reads them, catering to the morbid passion for mental and nervous stimulus, and which present to the minds of our young people scenes and incidents which men and women of the world cannot read without a shudder.

I am happy to believe that there is a reaction from the modern poison; that there is a return to a better state of feeling. Lead the minds of our young people back to the more wholesome diet, such as Scott and Thackeray and Dickens and George Eliot provide, and I recognize, in the work of this Society, a step in that direction. It is not in vain that you have taken up such a work as that. Literature ought not to contain such poison as I have referred to, and, thanks to such men as Scott, Thackeray and Dickens, and such women as George Eliot, there is ample reading without any resort to that.

And then his heroic industry. Shall I say one word about that? Scotchmen and Americans have been brought up for so many generations upon the gospel of hard work that mere industry is not

such a venerable virtue, but in him it indicated that high reserve, that indomitable purpose, which has hardly been manifested in such force by any other man in all my reading. When adversity overwhelmed him, when great schemes that he had built up with so much ambition came toppling about his head, he never wavered. He lost not one jot of heart or life. He held his head erect and worked on, until his tireless pen dropped from his dying hand. Every hour was full of life and aspiration to the end, and he personified in his own action, in his own fashion, his own favorite maxim:

And then his patriotism, noblest and proudest of his gifts. He loved his country with an intensity exceeding that of woman. He never tired of describing the glorious virtues of Scottish heroes, the beauties of Scottish landscape, and all that went to make the land of his birth heroic and beautiful. And so he drew the eyes and hearts of all men hither to admire and to love. His biographer says that upon the publication of the Lady of the Lake, swarms of English tourists came flocking over the borders the next summer, to visit the places which his magic pen had described.

But that was not all. This patriotic fervor, this irresistible charm which mark all his writings,