ne where Diana Vernon and Osbaldistone encounter each other on the
moonlit moor. The wild words of Clara, "Is it so, and was it even
yourself whom I saw even now?... And, all things considered, I do carry
on the farce of life wonderfully well,"--all this passage, with the
silence of the man, is on the highest level of poetic invention, and
Clara ranks with Ophelia. To her strain of madness we may ascribe,
perhaps, what Sydney Smith calls the vulgarity of her lighter moments.
But here the genius of Shakspeare is faultless, where Scott's is most
faulty and most mistaken.

Much confusion is caused in "St. Ronan's Well" by Scott's concession to
the delicacy of James Ballantyne. What has shaken Clara's brain? Not her
sham marriage, for that was innocent, and might be legally annulled.
Lockhart writes (vii. 208): "Sir Walter had shown a remarkable degree of
good-nature in the composition of this novel. When the end came in view,
James Ballantyne suddenly took vast alarm about a particular feature in
the heroine's history. In the original conception, and in the book as
actually written and printed, Miss Mowbray's mock marriage had not
halted at the profane ceremony of the church; and the delicate printer
shrank from the idea of obtruding on the fastidious public the
possibility of any personal contamination having occurred to a high-born
damsel of the nineteenth century." Scott answered: "You would never
have quarrelled with it had the thing happened to a girl in gingham--the
silk petticoat can make little difference." "James reclaimed with double
energy, and called Constable to the rescue; and, after some pause, the
author very reluctantly consented to cancel and re-write about
twenty-four pages, which was enough to obliterate, to a certain extent,
the dreaded scandal--and, in a similar degree, as he always persisted,
to perplex and weaken the course of his narrative, and the dark effect
of its catastrophe."

From a communication printed in the "Athenaeum" of Feb. 4, 1893, extracts
from the original proof-sheets, it seems that Lockhart forgot the
original plan of the novel. The mock marriage _did_ halt at the church
door, but Clara's virtue had yielded to her real lover, Tyrrel, before
the ceremony. Hannah Irwin had deliberately made opportunities for the
lovers' meeting, and at last, as she says, in a cancelled passage, "the
devil and Hannah Irwin prevailed." There followed remorse, and a
determination not to meet again bef