Sir Walter Scott as Editor of Dryden and Swift

Abstract

In the literary career of Sir Walter Scott the range, quality, and variety of achievement match the intrinsic virtues of man and artist. As poet, novelist, scholar, joumalist, he stamps his very individual character and taste upon his materials. While it may be true that the poems do not secure the highest effects of romantic poetry, that the novels are not everywhere of the same excellence, they sueceed in reflecting the honesty and integrity that inform all his work. And this is no less true of his editorial undertakings. The greatest and most significant of these are the editions of Dryden and Swift, but they also include the State Papers of Sir Ralph Sadleir in three volumes, the Tracts of Lord Somers in thirteen volumes, and the private memoirs of Sir Henry Slingsby, Captain Hodgson, Captain Carleton, and the Earl of Monmouth—curiously enough, all subjects that relate to various aspects of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century history. As an historian, Scott was delighted by such writings, but there was a humane principle at work, too, as he admitted to Lockhart when he wrote, "there was hardly one of my schemes that did not afford me the means of serving sorne poor devil of a brother author." It will be in order, first, to make a few general observations upon Scott's editions of Dryden and Swift that will point up his editorial limitations as well as his virtues, and then to proceed to a more particular analysis of each that will aim to demonstrate why the Dryden is to be preferred to the Swift.