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Garden Corner West Road. Cambridge.
Tel: 1688.
March 6. 1932
Dear John
Since I wrote to you some days ago, I have had a great time reading your Sir Walter, very slowly, weighing every word and enjoying every word. I am about 1/2 through now, and have besides read forward about the crash. When I have finished I shall have another course of the novels - I have already
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read a good deal in the poems to test your remarks.
I am quite sure no book one half as good about Scott will ever be written again. And for my part, such is the weakness of my flesh I prefer it - nefandum dictu! - to Lockhart, which I love to dip into and out of like Boswells Johnson, but not to read from end to end and wish for more, as I do yours. That does not make yours a greater work than Lockhart's, but I put them together as a pair, equally worthy of the subject.
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2.
Garden Corner, West Road, Cambridge Tel: 1688.
I am glad you have said Carlyle was talking nonsense (p. 290). I always thought so. The fact is that Scott rose to a moral level few "men of genius" have touched, in that affair of paying off his debts, the fact of it, the way of it, the mood of it too as recorded in the noblest journal. And this is all the more significant in that he was no saint - you have pointed out all the faults he had, good man - he was fashioned like
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unto us and therefore his rising to the height at the crisis makes him the greater example to us all. And that he was cruel to poor old Constable even at the moment of his greatest heroism makes the tale the more humanly credible.
I am wondering what on p.161 you mean by saying "if he errs at all in fairness it is in his portrait at Claverhouse'? Do you mean it is too favourable [in margin:] or too unfavourable? Yrs ever
George Trevelyan
