e to Glasgow, I bided
tryst on Glasgow Bridge, I met Rob Roy and the Bailie in the Tolbooth, all
with transporting pleasure; and then the clouds gathered once more about
my path; and I dozed and skipped until I stumbled half asleep into the
clachan of Aberfoyle, and the voices of Iverach and Galbraith recalled me
to myself. With that scene and the defeat of Captain Thornton the book
concluded; Helen and her sons shocked even the little schoolboy of nine or
ten with their unreality; I read no more, or I did not grasp what I was
reading; and years elapsed before I consciously met Diana and her father
among the hills, or saw Rashleigh dying in the chair. When I think of that
novel and that evening, I am impatient with all others; they seem but
shadows and impostors; they cannot satisfy the appetite which this
awakened; and I dare be known to think it the best of Sir Walter's by
nearly as much as Sir Walter is the best of novelists. Perhaps Mr. Lang is
right, and our first friends in the land of fiction are always the most
real. And yet I had read before this "Guy Mannering," and some of
"Waverley," with no such delighted sense of truth and humour, and I read
immediately after the greater part of the Waverley Novels, and was never
moved again in the same way or to the same degree. One circumstance is
suspicious: my critical estimate of the Waverley Novels has scarce changed
at all since I was ten. "Rob Roy," "Guy Mannering," and "Redgauntlet"
first; then, a little lower, "The Fortunes of Nigel"; then, after a huge
gulf, "Ivanhoe" and "Anne of Geierstein": the rest nowhere; such was the
verdict of the boy. Since then "The Antiquary," "St. Ronan's Well,"
"Kenilworth," and "The Heart of Midlothian" have gone up in the scale;
perhaps "Ivanhoe" and "Anne of Geierstein" have gone a trifle down; Diana
Vernon has been added to my admirations in that enchanted world of "Rob
Roy"; I think more of the letters in "Redgauntlet" and Peter Peebles, that
dreadful piece of realism, I can now read about with equanimity, interest,
and I had almost said pleasure, while to the childish critic he often
caused unmixed distress. But the rest is the same; I could not finish "The
Pirate" when I was a child, I have never finished it yet; "Peveril of the
Peak" dropped half way through from my schoolboy hands, and though I have
since waded to an end in a kind of wager with myself, the exercise was
quite without enjoyment. There is something disquieting in