is typical, that here as in the long line of brilliantly envisaged chronicle histories that followed, some of them far superior to this initial attempt, are to be found the characteristic method and charm of Sir Walter.  Here, as elsewhere, the reader is offered picturesque color, ever varied scenes, striking situations, salient characters and a certain nobility both of theme and manner that comes from the accustomed representation of life in which large issues of family and state are involved—­the whole merged in a mood of fealty and love.  You constantly feel in Scott that life “means intensely and means good.”  A certain amount of lovable partisanship and prejudice goes with the view, not un-welcomely; there is also some carelessness as to the minute details of fact.  But the effect of truth, both in character and setting, is overwhelming.  Scott has vivified English and Scotch history more than all the history books:  he saw it himself—­so we see it.  One of the reasons his work rings true—­whereas Mrs. Radcliffe’s adventure tales seem fictitious as well as feeble—­is because it is the natural outcome of his life:  all his interest, his liking, his belief went into the Novels.  When he sat down at the mature age of forty-three to make fiction, there was behind him the large part of a lifetime of unconscious preparation for what he had to do:  for years he had been steeped in the folk-lore and legend of his native country; its local history had been his hobby; he had not only read its humbler literature but wandered widely among its people, absorbed its language and its life, felt “the very pulse of the machine.”  Hence he differed toto caelo from an archeologist turned romancer like the German Ebers:  being rather a genial traveler who, after telling tales of his experiences by word of mouth at the tavern hearth, sets them down upon paper for better preservation.  He had been no less student than pedestrian in the field; lame as he was, he had footed his way to many a tall memorial of a hoary past, and when still hardly more than a boy, burrowed among the manuscripts of the Advocates’ Library in Edinburgh, making himself an able antiquary at a time when most youth are idling or philandering.  Moreover, he was himself the son of a border chief and knew minstrelsy almost at his nurse’s knee:  and the lilt of a ballad was always like wine to his heart.  It makes you think of Sir Philip Sidney’s splendid testimony to such an influence:  “I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet.”

All this could not but tell; the incidents in a book like “Waverley” are unforced:  the advance of the story closely imitates Life in its ever-shifting succession of events:  the reader soon learns to trust the author’s faculty of invention.  Plot, story-interest, is it not the backbone of romantic fiction?  And Scott, though perchance he may not conduct it so swiftly as pleases the modern taste, may be relied on to furnish it.