h a profusion of
auburn hair, and a harp, the soft solace of her
solitary hours, which she fortunately always finds
means of transporting from castle to cottage, though
she herself be sometimes obliged to jump out of a
two-pair-of-stairs window and is more than once
bewildered on her journey, alone and on foot, without
any guide but a blowsy peasant girl, whose jargon she
can scarcely understand? Or again, if my _Waverley_ had
been entitled 'A Tale of the Times,' wouldst thou not,
gentle reader, have demanded from me a dashing sketch
of the fashionable world, a few anecdotes of private
scandal ... a heroine from Grosvenor Square, and a hero
from the Barouche Club or the Four in Hand, with a set
of subordinate characters from the elegantes of Queen
Anne Street, East, or the dashing heroes of the Bow
Street Office?"

Yet Scott himself had once trodden in these well-worn paths of
romance. In the general preface to the collected edition of 1829,
wherein he seeks to "ravel out his weaved-up follies," he refers
to "a tale of chivalry planned thirty years earlier in the style
of _The Castle of Otranto_, with plenty of Border characters and
supernatural incident." His outline of the plot and a fragment of
the story, which was to be entitled _Thomas the Rhymer_, are
printed as an appendix to the preface. Scott intended to base his
story on an ancient legend, found in Reginald Scot's _Discovery
of Witchcraft_, concerning the horn and sword of Thomas of
Hercildoune. Cannobie Dick, a jolly horse-cowper, was led by a
mysterious stranger through an opening in a hillside into a long
range of stables. In every stall stood a coal-black horse, and by
every horse lay a knight in coal-black armour, with a drawn sword
in his hand. All were as still and silent as if hewn out of
marble. At the far end of a gloomy hall, illuminated, like the
halls of Eblis, only by torches, there lay, upon an ancient
table, a horn and a sword. A voice bade Dick try his courage,
warning him that much depended upon his first choosing either the
horn or the sword. Dick, whose stout heart quailed before the
supernatural terrors of the hall, attempted to blow the horn
before unsheathing the sword. At the first feeble blast the
warriors and their steeds started to life, the knights fiercely
brandishing their weapons and clashing their armour. Dick made a
fruitless attempt to snatch