ery day around
us in real life. All that is meant to be advanced is, that this variety
must be confined within certain limits, if the interest of the piece is to
be properly kept up; and that it should be an especial object with the
novelist to avoid that complication and intricacy of incidents which forms
so formidable, though unavoidable, an addition to the difficulties of an
historian. It is the more singular that romance writers should have
fallen into this mistake, that it is the very difficulty which stands
most in the way of the interest of history, and which it is the peculiar
advantage of their art to be able in a great measure to avoid. Yet it is
the error which is most general in writers of the greatest ability in this
department of literature, and which has marred or ruined the effect of
some of their happiest conceptions. It has arisen, doubtless, from romance
writers having observed the extreme multiplicity of incidents and events
in real life, and in the complicated maze of historical narrative; and
thence imagined that it was by portraying a similar combination that
romance was to be assimilated to truthful annals, and the ideal founded on
the solid basis of the real. They forget that it is this very complication
which renders history in general so uninviting, and acceptable (compared
with romance) to so limited a circle of readers; and that the annals of
actual events then only approach to the interest of fiction, when their
surpassing magnitude, or the importance of the characters involved in
them, justifies the historian in suspending for a time the thread of
inconsiderable and uninteresting incidents, and throwing a broad and
bright light, similar to that of imagination, on the few which have been
attended with great and lasting effects.

The great father of historical romance rarely falls into this mistake. The
story, at least in most of his earlier and most popular
pieces--_Waverley_, the _Antiquary_, the _Bride of Lammermoor_, _Old
Mortality_, the _Abbot_, _Ivanhoe_, _Kenilworth_, _Quentin Durward_, and
_Rob Roy_--is extremely simple; the incidents few and well chosen; the
interest of an _homogeneous_ kind, and uniformly sustained; the inferior
characters and incidents kept in their due subordination to the principal
ones. The subordinate characters of these admirable works, their still
life, descriptions, and minor incidents, are grouped as it were around the
main events of the story, and brought