we have already
had occasion repeatedly to notice, and which have attracted the
attention of the public in no common degree,--we mean Waverley, Guy
Mannering, and the Antiquary, and we have little hesitation to pronounce
them either entirely, or in a great measure, the work of the same
author. Why he should industriously endeavour to elude observation by
taking leave of us in one character, and then suddenly popping out upon
us in another, we cannot pretend to guess without knowing more of his
personal reasons for preserving so strict an incognito that has hitherto
reached us. We can, however, conceive many reasons for a writer
observing this sort of mystery; not to mention that it has certainly had
its effect in keeping up the interest which his works have excited.

We do not know if the imagination of our author will sink in the opinion
of the public when deprived of that degree of invention which we have
been hitherto disposed to ascribe to him; but we are certain that it
ought to increase the value of his portraits, that human beings have
actually sate for them. These coincidences between fiction and reality
are perhaps the very circumstances to which the success of these novels
is in a great measure to be attributed: for, without depreciating the
merit of the artist, every spectator at once recognizes in those scenes
and faces which are copied from nature an air of distinct reality, which
is not attached to fancy-pieces however happily conceived and
elaborately executed. By what sort of freemasonry, if we may use the
term, the mind arrives at this conviction, we do not pretend to guess,
but every one must have felt that he instinctively and almost insensibly
recognizes in painting, poetry, or other works of imagination, that
which is copied from existing nature, and that he forthwith clings to it
with that kindred interest which thinks nothing which is human
indifferent to humanity. Before therefore we proceed to analyse the work
immediately before us, we beg leave briefly to notice a few
circumstances connected with its predecessors.

Our author has told us it was his object to present a succession of
scenes and characters connected with Scotland in its past and present
state, and we must own that his stories are so slightly constructed as
to remind us of the showman's thread with which he draws up his pictures
and presents them successively to the eye of the spectator. He seems
seriously to have proceeded on Mr