The Quarterly Review (Volume 190) (Paperback)

Book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1899. Excerpt: ... Art. VII.--Le Roman Historique a TEpoque Romantique. Essai sur l'influence de Walter Scott. Par Louis Maigron, Docteur es lettres, Charge de Cours a la Faculte des Lettres de Lyon. Paris, Hachette, 1898. WHEN Scott was in Paris with the Allied armies in 1814, he had no more ardent admirer than the Hetman PlatofF. The Cossack chief insisted on mounting him for reviews, and furnished the poet of the mosstrooping Borderers with escorts of his own very irregular horse. Both were emphatically men, yet it would seem that they had little in common. The Cossack was not what Captain Costigan calls a literary character; it may be doubted whether he had ever read a line of The Lay, ' and his archaeological tastes, like German theological criticism, were destructive rather than sentimental. Whatever sympathies may have attracted the Hetman to the poet, he was paying honour to a conqueror destined to win triumphs in fields of his own as great as those of the Colossus whom the Allies had overthrown. But his instinctive appreciation was in great measure prophetic. Napoleon's career came to a close as that of the novelist was beginning. In 1814 the great soldier won his last victory; the same year launched Scott in romance, and saw the publication of ' Waverley.' It was the beginning of a series of triumphs not less brilliant, and in some ways more surprising, than those which had brought Europe to the feet of France. Conquering heroes whose genius has controlled and directed brute force have appeared, from time to time, in the world's history; but for a man of modest pretensions and unpromising antecedents to work a sudden and cosmopolitan revolution in the realms of letters and taste is a rare and perhaps an unparalleled phenomenon. The immortals live in their works; but Homer and Horace, ...