ery few writers can be held to
surpass Sir Walter Scott. According to Basil Hall, "The
Antiquary" was Scott's own favourite romance. It was published
in May, 1816, the third of the Waverley Novels, and in it the
author intended to illustrate the manners of Scotland during
the last ten years of the eighteenth century. "I have been
more solicitous," he writes, "to describe manners minutely,
than to arrange in any case an artificial and combined
narrative, and have but to regret that I felt myself unable to
unite these two requisites of a good novel." Scott took
considerable pains to point out that old Edie Ochiltree, the
wandering mendicant with his blue gown, was by no means to be
confounded with the utterly degraded class of beings who now
practise that wandering trade. Although "The Antiquary" was
not so well received on its first appearance as "Waverley" or
"Guy Mannering," it soon rose to equal, and with some readers,
superior popularity.

_I.--Travelling Companions_

It was early on a fine summer's day, near the end of the eighteenth
century, when a young man of genteel appearance, journeying towards the
north-east of Scotland, provided himself with a ticket in one of those
public carriages which travel between Edinburgh and the Queensferry, at
which place there is a passage-boat for crossing the Firth of Forth.

The young gentleman was soon joined by a companion, a good-looking man
of the age of sixty, perhaps older, but his hale complexion and firm
step announced that years had not impaired his strength of health. This
senior traveller, Mr. Jonathan Oldenbuck (by popular contraction
Oldbuck), of Monkbarns, was the owner of a small property in the
neighbourhood of a thriving seaport town on the north-eastern coast of
Scotland, which we shall denominate Fairport. His tastes were
antiquarian, his wishes very moderate. The burghers of the town regarded
him with a sort of envy, as one who affected to divide himself from
their rank in society, and whose studies and pleasures seemed to them
alike incomprehensible. Some habits of hasty irritation he had
contracted, partly from an early disappointment in love, but yet more by
the obsequious attention paid to him by his maiden sister and his orphan
niece.

Mr. Oldbuck, finding his fellow-traveller an interested and intelligent
auditor, plunged at once into a sea of discussion concerning