he will regard them as an inferior part only of his art; as speaking
to the eye, not the heart; as the body of romance, not its soul; and as
valuable chiefly as giving character or life to the period described, and
repose to the mind in the intervals of the scenes of mental interest or
pathos, on which his principal efforts are to be concentrated.
Descriptions of external things often strike us as extremely brilliant,
and give great pleasure in reading; but with a few exceptions, where a
_moral_ interest has been thrown into the picture of nature, they do not
leave any profound or lasting impression on the mind. It is human grandeur
or magnanimity, the throb of grief, the thrill of the pathetic, which is
imprinted in indelible characters on the memory. Many of the admirable
descriptions of still life in _Waverley_ fade from the recollection, and
strike us as new every time we read them; but no one ever forgot the last
words of Fergus, when passing on the hurdle under the Scotch gate at
Carlisle, "God save King _James_!" None of the splendid descriptions in
the choruses of AEschylus produce the terrible impression on the mind which
Sophocles has done by that inimitable trait, when, in the close of
_Antigone_, he makes Eurydice, upon hearing of the suicide of her son
Haemon on the body of his betrothed, leave the stage _in silence_, to
follow him by a violent death to the shades below.

The last rule which it seems material for the historical novelist to
observe, is that characteristic or national manners, especially in middle
or low life, should, wherever it is possible, be drawn from real life. The
manners of the highest class over all Europe are the same. If a novelist
paints well-bred person in one capital, his picture may, with a few slight
variations, stand for the same sphere of society in any other. But in
middle, and still more in low life, the diversity in different countries
is very great, and such as never can be reached by mere reading, or study
of the works of others. And yet, amidst all this diversity, so much is
human nature at bottom every where the same, that the most inexperienced
reader can distinguish, even in the delineation of manners to which he is
an entire stranger, those which are drawn from life, from those which are
taken from the sketches or ideas of others. Few in this country have
visited the Sierra Morena, and none certainly have seen it in the days of
Cervantes, yet we have no difficulty in