and bad plays afterwards.  One of his statements seems rather curious and hard to explain,—­“Though a good acting play may be made by selecting a plot and characters from a novel, yet scarce any effort of genius could render a play into a narrative romance.”  Perhaps he expected the “Terryfied” versions of Guy Mannering and Rob Roy to hold the stage longer than fate has permitted them to do.  From another point of view also he was interested in the connection of the novel and the drama.  He felt that the direction of the drama in the modern period had been largely determined by the influence of successful novels; and he probably overestimated the effect of the “romances of Calprenede and Scuderi” on heroic tragedy.[211]

A subject which recurs even oftener than that of the distinction between drama and novel is the question of supernatural machinery in novels.  Horace Walpole is commended for giving us ghosts without furnishing explanations.  Indeed the Castle of Otranto is highly praised;[212] but so also is Mrs. Radcliffe’s work, except on the one point of the attempt to rationalize mysteries.  The kind of romance which she “introduced"[213] is compared with the melodrama, and its particular mode of appeal is analyzed in very interesting fashion.  In the Life of Clara Reeve the proper treatment of ghosts is discussed at length, for that author had contended that ghosts should be very mild and of “sober demeanour.”  Scott justifies her practice, but not her theory, on the following grounds:  “What are the limits to be placed to the reader’s credulity, when those of common-sense and ordinary nature are at once exceeded?  The question admits only one answer, namely, that the author himself, being in fact the magician, shall evoke no spirits whom he is not capable of endowing with manners and language corresponding to their supernatural character.”

Scott writes with much enthusiasm about Defoe’s famous little ghost-story, The Apparition of Mrs. Veal, praising Defoe’s wonderful skill in making the unreal seem credible.  In connection with this tale Scott developed a very interesting anecdote to explain the fact that Drelincourt’s Defence against the Fear of Death is recommended by the apparition.  “Drelincourt’s book,” he says, “being neglected, lay a dead stock on the hands of the publisher.  In this emergency he applied to De Foe to assist him (by dint of such means as were then, as well as now, pretty well understood in the literary world) in rescuing the unfortunate book from the literary death to which general neglect seemed about to consign it.”  Scott goes on to assert that the story was simply a consummately clever advertising device.  He may have found the germ of his hypothesis in a bookseller’s tradition, but he states it as an assured fact, and doubtless believed it firmly because it seemed so beautifully reasonable.  His explanation became the basis of later statements on the subject, and