e shield, assumed for my hero, WAVERLEY, an
uncontaminated name, bearing with its sound little of good or evil,
excepting what the reader shall hereafter be pleased to affix to it. But
my second or supplemental title was a matter of much more difficult
election, since that, short as it is, may be held as pledging the author
to some special mode of laying his scene, drawing his characters, and
managing his adventures. Had I, for example, announced in my
frontispiece, 'Waverley, a Tale of other Days,' must not every
novel-reader have anticipated a castle scarce less than that of Udolpho,
of which the eastern wing had long been uninhabited, and the keys either
lost, or consigned to the care of some aged butler or housekeeper, whose
trembling steps, about the middle of the second volume, were doomed to
guide the hero, or heroine, to the ruinous precincts? Would not the owl
have shrieked and the cricket cried in my very title-page? and could it
have been possible for me, with a moderate attention to decorum, to
introduce any scene more lively than might be produced by the jocularity
of a clownish but faithful valet, or the garrulous narrative of the
heroine's fille-de-chambre, when rehearsing the stories of blood and
horror which she had heard in the servants' hall? Again, had my title
borne, 'Waverley, a Romance from the German,' what head so obtuse as not
to image forth a profligate abbot, an oppressive duke, a secret and
mysterious association of Rosycrucians and Illuminati, with all their
properties of black cowls, caverns, daggers, electrical machines,
trap-doors, and dark-lanterns? Or if I had rather chosen to call my work
a 'Sentimental Tale,' would it not have been a sufficient presage of a
heroine with a profusion of auburn hair, and a harp, the soft solace of
her solitary hours, which she fortunately finds always the means of
transporting from castle to cottage, although she herself be sometimes
obliged to jump out of a two-pair-of-stairs window, and is more than once
bewildered on her journey, alone and on foot, without any guide but a
blowzy peasant girl, whose jargon she hardly can understand? Or, again,
if my Waverley had been entitled 'A Tale of the Times,' wouldst thou not,
gentle reader, have demanded from me a dashing sketch of the fashionable
world, a few anecdotes of private scandal thinly veiled, and if
lusciously painted, so much the better? a heroine from Grosvenor Square,
and a hero from the Barouche Cl