, the supplying of epithets, the
colours of style, the grouping of his characters, and the regular march
of events, and comes to the point at once, and strikes at the heart
of his subject, without dismay and without disguise. His poetry was a
lady's waiting-maid, dressed out in cast-off finery: his prose is a
beautiful, rustic nymph, that, like Dorothea in Don Quixote, when she is
surprised with dishevelled tresses bathing her naked feet in the brook,
looks round her, abashed at the admiration her charms have excited! The
grand secret of the author's success in these latter productions is that
he has completely got rid of the trammels of authorship; and torn off at
one rent (as Lord Peter got rid of so many yards of lace in the _Tale of
a Tub_) all the ornaments of fine writing and worn-out sentimentality.
All is fresh, as from the hand of nature: by going a century or two back
and laying the scene in a remote and uncultivated district, all becomes
new and startling in the present advanced period.--Highland manners,
characters, scenery, superstitions, Northern dialect and costume, the
wars, the religion, and politics of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, give a charming and wholesome relief to the fastidious
refinement and "over-laboured lassitude" of modern readers, like the
effect of plunging a nervous valetudinarian into a cold-bath. The
_Scotch Novels_, for this reason, are not so much admired in Scotland as
in England. The contrast, the transition is less striking. From the top
of the Calton-Hill, the inhabitants of "Auld Reekie" can descry, or
fancy they descry the peaks of Ben Lomond and the waving outline of Rob
Roy's country: we who live at the southern extremity of the island can
only catch a glimpse of the billowy scene in the descriptions of the
Author of Waverley. The mountain air is most bracing to our languid
nerves, and it is brought us in ship-loads from the neighbourhood
of Abbot's-Ford. There is another circumstance to be taken into the
account. In Edinburgh there is a little opposition and something of
the spirit of cabal between the partisans of works proceeding from Mr.
Constable's and Mr. Blackwood's shops. Mr. Constable gives the highest
prices; but being the Whig bookseller, it is grudged that he should
do so. An attempt is therefore made to transfer a certain share of
popularity to the second-rate Scotch novels, "the embryo fry, the little
airy of _ricketty_ children," issuing through Mr. B