ten in his later ones to lengthen his
article for the indiscriminate market.

11. But there was one weakness of which his healthy mind remained
incapable to the last. In modern stories prepared for more refined or
fastidious audiences than those of Dickens, the funereal excitement is
obtained, for the most part, not by the infliction of violent or
disgusting death; but in the suspense, the pathos, and the more or less
by all felt, and recognized, mortal phenomena of the sick-room. The
temptation, to weak writers, of this order of subject is especially
great, because the study of it from the living--or dying--model is so
easy, and to many has been the most impressive part of their own
personal experience; while, if the description be given even with
mediocre accuracy, a very large section of readers will admire its
truth, and cherish its melancholy. Few authors of second or third rate
genius can either record or invent a probable conversation in ordinary
life; but few, on the other hand, are so destitute of observant faculty
as to be unable to chronicle the broken syllables and languid movements
of an invalid. The easily rendered, and too surely recognized, image of
familiar suffering is felt at once to be real where all else had been
false; and the historian of the gestures of fever and words of delirium
can count on the applause of a gratified audience as surely as the
dramatist who introduces on the stage of his flagging action a carriage
that can be driven or a fountain that will flow. But the masters of
strong imagination disdain such work, and those of deep sensibility
shrink from it.[39] Only under conditions of personal weakness,
presently to be noted, would Scott comply with the cravings of his lower
audience in scenes of terror like the death of Front-de-Boeuf. But he
never once withdrew the sacred curtain of the sick-chamber, nor
permitted the disgrace of wanton tears round the humiliation of
strength, or the wreck of beauty.

12. IV. No exception to this law of reverence will be found in the
scenes in Coeur de Lion's illness introductory to the principal
incident in the "Talisman." An inferior writer would have made the king
charge in imagination at the head of his chivalry, or wander in dreams
by the brooks of Aquitaine; but Scott allows us to learn no more
startling symptoms of the king's malady than that he was restless and
impatient, and could not wear his armor. Nor is any bodily weakness, or
crisis of