o be laid. Many now alive, you remarked, well
remembered persons who had not only seen the celebrated Roy
M'Gregor, but had feasted, and even fought with him. All those minute
circumstances belonging to private life and domestic character, all that
gives verisimilitude to a narrative, and individuality to the persons
introduced, is still known and remembered in Scotland; whereas in
England, civilisation has been so long complete, that our ideas of our
ancestors are only to be gleaned from musty records and chronicles, the
authors of which seem perversely to have conspired to suppress in their
narratives all interesting details, in order to find room for flowers of
monkish eloquence, or trite reflections upon morals. To match an English
and a Scottish author in the rival task of embodying and reviving the
traditions of their respective countries, would be, you alleged, in the
highest degree unequal and unjust. The Scottish magician, you said, was,
like Lucan's witch, at liberty to walk over the recent field of battle,
and to select for the subject of resuscitation by his sorceries, a body
whose limbs had recently quivered with existence, and whose throat
had but just uttered the last note of agony. Such a subject even the
powerful Erictho was compelled to select, as alone capable of being
reanimated even by "her" potent magic--

----gelidas leto scrutata medullas,
Pulmonis rigidi stantes sine vulnere fibras
Invenit, et vocem defuncto in corpore quaerit.

The English author, on the other hand, without supposing him less of
a conjuror than the Northern Warlock, can, you observed, only have the
liberty of selecting his subject amidst the dust of antiquity, where
nothing was to be found but dry, sapless, mouldering, and disjointed
bones, such as those which filled the valley of Jehoshaphat. You
expressed, besides, your apprehension, that the unpatriotic prejudices
of my countrymen would not allow fair play to such a work as that of
which I endeavoured to demonstrate the probable success. And this, you
said, was not entirely owing to the more general prejudice in favour of
that which is foreign, but that it rested partly upon improbabilities,
arising out of the circumstances in which the English reader is placed.
If you describe to him a set of wild manners, and a state of primitive
society existing in the Highlands of Scotland, he is much disposed to
acquiesce in the truth of what is asserted. And reason good