most effective description of skeleton riders.  Indeed, Scott at this time—­to those who did not know what was in him, which no one, not even excepting himself, did—­had no very sure prospects of comfort, to say nothing of wealth.  It is curious, too, that his first adventure in literature was thus connected with his interest in the preternatural, for no man ever lived whose genius was sounder and healthier, and less disposed to dwell on the half-and-half lights of a dim and eerie world; yet ghostly subjects always interested him deeply, and he often touched them in his stories, more, I think, from the strong artistic contrast they afforded to his favourite conceptions of life, than from any other motive.  There never was, I fancy, an organization less susceptible of this order of fears and superstitions than his own.  When a friend jokingly urged him, within a few months of his death, not to leave Rome on a Friday, as it was a day of bad omen for a journey, he replied, laughing, “Superstition is very picturesque, and I make it, at times, stand me in great stead, but I never allow it to interfere with interest or convenience.”  Basil Hall reports Scott’s having told him on the last evening of the year 1824, when they were talking over this subject, that “having once arrived at a country inn, he was told there was no bed for him.  ‘No place to lie down at all?’ said he.  ‘No,’ said the people of the house; ’none, except a room in which there is a corpse lying.’  ‘Well,’ said he, ’did the person die of any contagious disorder?’ ‘Oh, no; not at all,’ said they.  ’Well, then,’ continued he, ‘let me have the other bed.  So,’ said Sir Walter, ‘I laid me down, and never had a better night’s sleep in my life.’” He was, indeed, a man of iron nerve, whose truest artistic enjoyment was in noting the forms of character seen in full daylight by the light of the most ordinary experience.  Perhaps for that reason he can on occasion relate a preternatural incident, such as the appearance of old Alice at the fountain, at the very moment of her death, to the Master of Ravenswood, in The Bride of Lammermoor, with great effect.  It was probably the vivacity with which he realized the violence which such incidents do to the terrestrial common sense of our ordinary nature, and at the same time the sedulous accuracy of detail with which he narrated them, rather than any, even the smallest, special susceptibility of his own brain to thrills of the preternatural kind, which gave him rather a unique pleasure in dealing with such preternatural elements.  Sometimes, however, his ghosts are a little too muscular to produce their due effect as ghosts.  In translating Buerger’s ballad his great success lay in the vividness of the spectre’s horsemanship.  For instance,—­

    “Tramp! tramp! along the land they rode,
      Splash! splash! along the sea;
    The scourge is red, the spur drops blood,
      The flashing pebbles flee,”