literary particulars for my help & elevation.
Your time need not be thrown away, for at your further leisure you
can make Columbian lectures out of the results & do your students a
good turn.

1. Are there in Sir Walter's novels passages done in good English
--English which is neither slovenly nor involved?

2. Are there passages whose English is not poor & thin &
commonplace, but is of a quality above that?

3. Are there passages which burn with real fire--not punk, fox-
fire, make-believe?
4. Has he heroes & heroines who are not cads and cadesses?

5. Has he personages whose acts & talk correspond with their
characters as described by him?

6. Has he heroes & heroines whom the reader admires--admires and
knows why?

7. Has he funny characters that are funny, and humorous passages
that are humorous?

8. Does he ever chain the reader's interest & make him reluctant to
lay the book down?

9. Are there pages where he ceases from posing, ceases from
admiring the placid flood & flow of his own dilution, ceases from
being artificial, & is for a time, long or short, recognizably
sincere & in earnest?

10. Did he know how to write English, & didn't do it because he
didn't want to?

11. Did he use the right word only when he couldn't think of
another one, or did he run so much to wrong words because he didn't
know the right one when he saw it?

12. Can you read him and keep your respect for him? Of course a
person could in his day--an era of sentimentality & sloppy
romantics--but land! can a body do it to-day?

Brander, I lie here dying; slowly dying, under the blight of Sir
Walter. I have read the first volume of Rob Roy, & as far as
Chapter XIX of Guy Mannering, & I can no longer hold my head up or
take my nourishment. Lord, it's all so juvenile! so artificial, so
shoddy; & such wax figures & skeletons & specters. Interest? Why,
it is impossible to feel an interest in these bloodless shams, these
milk-&-water humbugs. And oh, the poverty of invention! Not
poverty in inventing situations, but poverty in furnishing reasons
for them. Sir Walter usually gives himself away when he arranges
for a situation--elaborates & elaborates & elaborates till, if you
live to get to it, you don't believe in it when it happens.

I can't find the rest of Rob Roy