and
appropriate details. Then we forget the characters; then we push the
hero aside; then we plunge into the tale in our own person and bathe
in fresh experience; and then, and then only, do we say we have been
reading a romance. It is not only pleasurable things that we imagine
in our day-dreams; there are lights in which we are willing to
contemplate even the idea of our own death; ways in which it seems as
if it would amuse us to be cheated, wounded or calumniated. It is thus
possible to construct a story, even of tragic import, in which every
incident, detail and trick of circumstance shall be welcome to the
reader's thoughts. Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the
child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his
life; and when the game so chimes with his fancy that he can join in
it with all his heart, when it pleases him with every turn, when he
loves to recall it and dwells upon its recollection with entire
delight, fiction is called romance.

Walter Scott is out and away the king of the romantics. _The Lady of
the Lake_ has no indisputable claim to be a poem beyond the inherent
fitness and desirability of the tale. It is just such a story as a man
would make up for himself, walking, in the best health and temper,
through just such scenes as it is laid in. Hence it is that a charm
dwells undefinable among these slovenly verses, as the unseen cuckoo
fills the mountains with his note; hence, even after we have flung the
book aside, the scenery and adventures remain present to the mind, a
new and green possession, not unworthy of that beautiful name, _The
Lady of the Lake_,[29] or that direct, romantic opening,--one of the
most spirited and poetical in literature,--"The stag at eve had drunk
his fill." The same strength and the same weaknesses adorn and
disfigure the novels. In that ill-written, ragged book, _The
Pirate_,[30] the figure of Cleveland--cast up by the sea on the
resounding foreland of Dunrossness--moving, with the blood on his
hands and the Spanish words on his tongue, among the simple
islanders--singing a serenade under the window of his Shetland
mistress--is conceived in the very highest manner of romantic
invention. The words of his song, "Through groves of palm," sung in
such a scene and by such a lover, clench, as in a nutshell, the
emphatic contrast upon which the tale is built. In _Guy
Mannering_,[31] again, every incident is delightful to the
imagination; and the s