lackwood's shop-door.
This operates a diversion, which does not affect us here. The Author of
Waverley wears the palm of legendary lore alone. Sir Walter may, indeed,
surfeit us: his imitators make us sick! It may be asked, it has been
asked, "Have we no materials for romance in England? Must we look to
Scotland for a supply of whatever is original and striking in this
kind?" And we answer--"Yes!" Every foot of soil is with us worked up:
nearly every movement of the social machine is calculable. We have no
room left for violent catastrophes; for grotesque quaintnesses; for
wizard spells. The last skirts of ignorance and barbarism are seen
hovering (in Sir Walter's pages) over the Border. We have, it is true,
gipsies in this country as well as at the Cairn of Derncleugh: but they
live under clipped hedges, and repose in camp-beds, and do not perch
on crags, like eagles, or take shelter, like sea-mews, in basaltic
subterranean caverns. We have heaths with rude heaps of stones upon
them: but no existing superstition converts them into the Geese of
Micklestane-Moor, or sees a Black Dwarf groping among them. We have
sects in religion: but the only thing sublime or ridiculous in that way
is Mr. Irving, the Caledonian preacher, who "comes like a satyr staring
from the woods, and yet speaks like an orator!" We had a Parson Adams
not quite a hundred years ago--a Sir Roger de Coverley rather more than
a hundred! Even Sir Walter is ordinarily obliged to pitch his angle
(strong as the hook is) a hundred miles to the North of the "Modern
Athens" or a century back. His last work,[A] indeed, is mystical,
is romantic in nothing but the title-page. Instead of "a
holy-water sprinkle dipped in dew," he has given us a fashionable
watering-place--and we see what he has made of it. He must not come down
from his fastnesses in traditional barbarism and native rusticity: the
level, the littleness, the frippery of modern civilization will undo him
as it has undone us!

Sir Walter has found out (oh, rare discovery) that facts are better than
fiction; that there is no romance like the romance of real life; and
that if we can but arrive at what men feel, do, and say in striking and
singular situations, the result will be "more lively, audible, and full
of vent," than the fine-spun cobwebs of the brain. With reverence be it
spoken, he is like the man who having to imitate the squeaking of a pig
upon the stage, brought the animal under his coat with