him. Our author
has conjured up the actual people he has to deal with, or as much as he
could get of them, in "their habits as they lived." He has ransacked old
chronicles, and poured the contents upon his page; he has squeezed out
musty records; he has consulted wayfaring pilgrims, bed-rid sibyls; he
has invoked the spirits of the air; he has conversed with the living and
the dead, and let them tell their story their own way; and by borrowing
of others, has enriched his own genius with everlasting variety, truth,
and freedom. He has taken his materials from the original, authentic
sources, in large concrete masses, and not tampered with or too much
frittered them away. He is only the amanuensis of truth and history. It
is impossible to say how fine his writings in consequence are, unless we
could describe how fine nature is. All that portion of the history of
his country that he has touched upon (wide as the scope is) the manners,
the personages, the events, the scenery, lives over again in his
volumes. Nothing is wanting--the illusion is complete. There is a
hurtling in the air, a trampling of feet upon the ground, as these
perfect representations of human character or fanciful belief come
thronging back upon our imaginations. We will merely recall a few of
the subjects of his pencil to the reader's recollection; for nothing we
could add, by way of note or commendation, could make the impression
more vivid.

There is (first and foremost, because the earliest of our acquaintance)
the Baron of Bradwardine, stately, kind-hearted, whimsical, pedantic;
and Flora MacIvor (whom even _we_ forgive for her Jacobitism), the
fierce Vich Ian Vohr, and Evan Dhu, constant in death, and Davie
Gellatly roasting his eggs or turning his rhymes with restless
volubility, and the two stag-hounds that met Waverley, as fine as ever
Titian painted, or Paul Veronese:--then there is old Balfour of Burley,
brandishing his sword and his Bible with fire-eyed fury, trying a
fall with the insolent, gigantic Bothwell at the 'Change-house, and
vanquishing him at the noble battle of Loudonhill; there is Bothwell
himself, drawn to the life, proud, cruel, selfish, profligate, but with
the love-letters of the gentle Alice (written thirty years before), and
his verses to her memory, found in his pocket after his death: in the
same volume of _Old Mortality_ is that lone figure, like a figure in
Scripture, of the woman sitting on the stone at the turning to