Above all, the character of Ezekiel Daw - though the outline must have been suggested by that of Abraham Adams – is so well distinguished by original and spirited conception that it may pass for an excellent original. The Methodists, as they abhor the lighter arts of literature and, perhaps, contemn those which are more serious have, as might have been expected, met much rough usage at the hands of novelists and dramatic authors, who generally represent them either as idiots or hypocrites. A very different feeling is due to many, perhaps to most, of this enthusiastic sect; nor is it rashly to be inferred that he who makes religion the general object of his life is, for that sole reason, to be held either a fool or an imposter. The professions of strict piety are inconsistent with open vice and, therefore, must, in the general case, lead men to avoid the secret practice of what, openly known, must be attended with loss of character; and, thus, the Methodists, and other rigid sectaries, oppose to temptation the strong barriers of interest and habitual restraint, in addition to those restrictions which religion and morality impose on all men. The touch of enthusiasm connected with Methodism renders it a species of devotion, warmly affecting the feelings and, therefore, peculiarly calculated to operate upon the millions of ignorant poor, whose understandings the most learned divines would, in vain, address by mere force of argument; and, doubtless, many such simple enthusiasts as Ezekiel Daw, by their well-meant and indefatigable exertions amongst the stubborn and ignorant, have been the instruments of Providence to call such men from a state of degrading and brutal profligacy to a life more worthy of rational beings, and of the name of Christians. Thus, thinking, we are of opinion that the character of Ezekiel Daw, which shows the Methodist preacher in his strength and in his weakness – bold and fervent when in discharge of his mission; simple, well-meaning, and even absurd, in the ordinary affairs of life – is not only an exquisite, but a just portrait.
From: “Richard Cumberland,” in The Lives of the Novelists by Sir Walter Scott; reprinted in the Everyman’s Library series (with an introduction by George Saintsbury) (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1910), pp. 137-138. The Lives of the Novelists, a series of biographies of the novelists included in a collection of their works reprinted by Scott’s publisher, was originally published in the early 1820s.
Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) was the most famous and the most important Scottish novelist of the first half of the 19th century. Richard Cumberland (1732-1811), though now virtually totally forgotten, was a prolific 18th and early 19th century playwright and novelist.
