sley's _Hypatia_, may have attained a
place beside the best of them. They were a novelty when they appeared.
English prose fiction had somewhat declined since the time of Fielding
and Goldsmith. There were truthful, though rather tame, delineations of
provincial life, like Jane Austen's _Sense and Sensibility_, 1811, and
{248} _Pride and Prejudice_, 1813; or Maria Edgeworth's _Popular Tales_,
1804. On the other hand, there were Gothic romances, like the _Monk_ of
Matthew Gregory Lewis, to whose _Tales of Wonder_ some of Scott's
translations from the German had been contributed; or like Anne
Radcliffe's _Mysteries of Udolpho_. The great original of this school of
fiction was Horace Walpole's _Castle of Otranto_, 1765, an absurd tale of
secret trap-doors, subterranean vaults, apparitions of monstrous mailed
figures and colossal helmets, pictures that descend from their frames,
and hollow voices that proclaim the ruin of ancient families.

Scott used the machinery of romance, but he was not merely a romancer, or
a historical novelist even, and it is not, as Carlyle implies, the
buff-belts and jerkins which principally interest us in his heroes.
_Ivanhoe_ and _Kenilworth_ and the _Talisman_ are, indeed, romances pure
and simple, and very good romances at that. But, in novels such as _Rob
Roy_, the _Antiquary_, the _Heart of Midlothian_, and the _Bride of
Lammermoor_, Scott drew from contemporary life, and from his intimate
knowledge of Scotch character. The story is there, with its entanglement
of plot and its exciting adventures, but there are also, as truly as in
Shakspere, though not in the same degree, the observation of life, the
knowledge of men, the power of dramatic creation. No writer awakens in
his readers a warmer personal affection than Walter Scott, the brave,
honest, kindly gentleman, the noblest {249} figure among the literary men
of his generation.

Another Scotch poet was Thomas Campbell, whose _Pleasures of Hope_, 1799,
was written in Pope's couplet, and in the stilted diction of the
eighteenth century. _Gertrude of Wyoming_, 1809, a long narrative poem
in Spenserian stanza, is untrue to the scenery and life of Pennsylvania,
where its scene is laid. But Campbell turned his rhetorical manner and
his clanking, martial verse to fine advantage in such pieces as
_Hohenlinden_, _Ye Mariners of England_, and the _Battle of the Baltic_.
These have the true lyric fire, and rank among the best English war-s