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182 moral standards were set at too low a water-mark for the high tides of poetry. With the most splendid and vigorous versification, with an energy of satire and wit that had the point of the dagger and the weight of the axe, Dryden was deficient in what Scott possessed. He would have lacked the picturesque which calls up yesterday, and the sentiment which links it with to-day. The machinery of guardian angels which he proposed is enough to show that the first design was a failure. It is a great poetical mistake to revive exploded superstition. The gods are effective in Homer, because both the age of which he wrote and that in which he wrote, believed devoutly in the terrors of their thunder. But the guardian angels of England, Ireland, and Scotland—St. George, St. Patrick, and St. Andrew—could never have been more than ingenious human inventions. Scott did as much with superstition as any modern writer could venture. He gave the omen, the prophecy, and the gramarye, without which the picture he drew would have been incomplete. And what a picture he has drawn! how true, how breathing! It is England, exactly as England was: full of tumult and of adventure, but with a rude sense of justice and a dawn of information destined to produce such vast after-growth of knowledge and prosperity. No writer has the art of conveying so much by a slight intimation. Sir Hugh, the Heron bold, urges