is own romances he preferred Mrs. Shelley's "Frankenstein."

[Scott reviewed "Frankenstein" in 1818. Mr. Shelley had sent it with a
brief note, it, which he said that it was the work of a friend, and that
he had only seen it through the press. Sir Walter passed the hook on to
Mr. Murritt, who, in reply, gave Scott a brief and not very accurate
history of Shelley. Sir Walter then wrote a most favourable review of
"Frankenstein" in "Blackwood's Magazine," observing that it was
attributed to Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley, a son-in-law of Mr. Godwin. Mrs.
Shelley presently wrote thanking him for the review, and assuring him
that it was her own work. Scott had apparently taken Sheller's disclaimer
as an innocent evasion; it was an age of literary superscheries.
--Abbotsford Manuscripts.]

As a critic, of course, he was mistaken; but his was the generous error
of the heart, and it is the heart in Walter Scott, even more than the
brain, that lends its own vitality to his creations. Equipped as he was
with a taste truly catholic, capable in old age of admiring "Pelham," he
had the power to do what he calls "the big bow-wow strain;" yet he was
not, as in his modesty he supposed, denied "the exquisite torch which
renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the
truth of the description and the sentiment."

The letter of Rose Bradwardine to Waverley is alone enough to disprove
Scott's disparagement of himself, his belief that he had been denied
exquisiteness of touch. Nothing human is more delicate, nothing should be
more delicately handled, than the first love of a girl. What the
"analytical" modern novelist would pass over and dissect and place
beneath his microscope till a student of any manliness blushes with shame
and annoyance, Scott suffers Rose Bradwardine to reveal with a sensitive
shyness. But Scott, of course, had even less in common with the peeper
and botanizer on maidens' hearts than with the wildest romanticist. He
considered that "a want of story is always fatal to a book the first
reading, and it is well if it gets a chance of a second." From him "Pride
and Prejudice" got a chance of three readings at least. This generous
universality of taste, in addition to all his other qualities of humour
and poetry, enabled Scott to raise the novel from its decadence, and to
make the dry bones of history live again in his tales. With Charles
Edward at Holyrood, as Mr. Senior wrote in the "Quarterly Review,