, and the brutish ignorance of the body of
the people:--if these are, as we conceive they are, the sources of the
charm which still operates in behalf of the days of knightly adventure,
then it should follow, that nothing should interest us, by association
with that age, but what serves naturally to bring before us those
hazards and that valour, and gallantry, and aristocratical superiority.
Any description, or any imitation of the exploits in which those
qualities were signalized, will do this most effectually.
Battles,--tournaments,--penances,--deliverance of damsels,--instalments
of knights, &c.--and, intermixed with these, we must admit some
description of arms, armorial bearings, castles, battlements, and
chapels: but the least and lowest of the whole certainly is the
description of servants' liveries, and of the peaceful operations of
eating, drinking, and ordinary salutation. These have no sensible
connexion with the qualities or peculiarities which have conferred
certain poetical privileges on the manners of chivalry. They do not
enter either necessarily or naturally into our conception of what is
interesting in those manners; and, though protected, by their
strangeness, from the ridicule which would infallibly attach to their
modern equivalents, are substantially as unpoetic, and as little
entitled to indulgence from impartial criticism.

We would extend this censure to a larger proportion of the work before
us than we now choose to mention--certainly to all the stupid monkish
legends about St Hilda and St Cuthbert--to the ludicrous description of
Lord Gifford's habiliments of divination--and to all the various scraps
and fragments of antiquarian history and baronial biography, which are
scattered profusely through the whole narrative. These we conceive to be
put in purely for the sake of displaying the erudition of the author;
and poetry, which has no other recommendation, but that the substance of
it has been gleaned from rare or obscure books, has, in our estimation,
the least of all possible recommendations. Mr Scott's great talents, and
the novelty of the style in which his romances are written, have made
even these defects acceptable to a considerable part of his readers. His
genius, seconded by the omnipotence of fashion, has brought chivalry
again into temporary favour; but he ought to know, that this is a taste
too evidently unnatural to be long prevalent in the modern world. Fine
ladies and gentlemen