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magazines from which the Scotch Romance writer has helped himself by handsfull . Shakspeare is an inexhaustible mine of treasures ; but those treasures are sometimes mingled with impure scoria , tending to debase them . Walter Scott has given them such an exquisite purity and polish , that in truth it is necessary to
regard them closely before we can say , " all that diamond belongs to Shakspeare . " * Be it known , however , that I do not here allude to the history or fable of Scott ' s Romances , but to characters and personages . The eras described by Shakspeare are precisely those through which the great novelist has ranged with the utmost delight . With but few exceptions , as where , for instance , he has enchanted his readers by selecting scenes from the more than chivalrous
enterprises of the Crusaders , the England painted by him is the same England on which the Great Tragedian cast such a blaze of light . The conflicts and controversies of the reformers of religion ; the depositions of a powerful , barbarous , yet magnanimous nobility ; the commonalty ignorant , lawless , tremendous ; the pomps of the florid reign of Elizabeth ; the iron despotism of Henry VIHth , who cut the throats of all whose faitli happened
to be greater or smaller than his own ; the wars and political dissentions of the two Roses ; then the great revolution ; a dynasty brought low , murdered , revived , banished , victorious , and at last annihilated for ever ! What ages of vigor , of glory , of debasement , of adventures ! On the one hand , rude and ferocious manners and customs , inconstancy and desire of change ;
awful conflicts of earthly passions , of religious fanaticism , of abject and cruel superstitions ; prodigies of valor and cruel sacrifices , which would have been incredible had not their ages been so near our own ! On the other side , the finessing , the exquisite artfulness and profound cunning of courtiers and statesmen educated in the Machiavellian doctrines more by instinct than by
meditation ; then the " ladies , " already in possession of a sceptre whose prerogative seemed to partake of magic . In short , ages truly dramatic , ages whose customs and characters had no predominant colour , but which produced , as a tout ensemble , a coup ( Tail so strikinglv picturesque as to allure the gaze even of the
most fastidious ; a species of panorama in which all the extravagances of human nature were displayed , sometimes separate , sometimes together , as if for the purpose of confounding the minds of posterity , and making it almost impossible to discern the thread which connected such events !
Such was the England of Shakspeare ; such that of Walter Scott ; and these two most powerful geniuses found there an inexhaustible fount of poesy . Shakspeare trod in the path of truth , he had for his prototype nature in action ; he accumulated l ' ooh ! pooh !—E » .
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Rossini and Walter Scott . 569
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1836, page 569, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2661/page/45/
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