elt
at once to be real where all else had been false; and the historian of
the gestures of fever and words of delirium can count on the applause of
a gratified audience as surely as the dramatist who introduces on the
stage of his flagging action a carriage that can be driven or a fountain
that will flow. But the masters of strong imagination disdain such work,
and those of deep sensibility shrink from it.[154] Only under conditions
of personal weakness, presently to be noted, would Scott comply with the
cravings of his lower audience in scenes of terror like the death of
Front-de-Boeuf. But he never once withdrew the sacred curtain of the
sick-chamber, nor permitted the disgrace of wanton tears round the
humiliation of strength, or the wreck of beauty.

IV. No exception to this law of reverence will be found in the scenes in
Coeur de Lion's illness introductory to the principal incident in the
_Talisman_. An inferior writer would have made the king charge in
imagination at the head of his chivalry, or wander in dreams by the
brooks of Aquitaine; but Scott allows us to learn no more startling
symptoms of the king's malady than that he was restless and impatient,
and could not wear his armour. Nor is any bodily weakness, or crisis of
danger, permitted to disturb for an instant the royalty of intelligence
and heart in which he examines, trusts and obeys the physician whom his
attendants fear.

Yet the choice of the main subject in this story and its companion--the
trial, to a point of utter torture, of knightly faith, and several
passages in the conduct of both, more especially the exaggerated scenes
in the House of Baldringham, and hermitage of Engedi, are signs of the
gradual decline in force of intellect and soul which those who love
Scott best have done him the worst injustice in their endeavours to
disguise or deny. The mean anxieties, moral humiliations, and
mercilessly demanded brain-toil, which killed him, show their sepulchral
grasp for many and many a year before their final victory; and the
states of more or less dulled, distorted, and polluted imagination which
culminate in _Castle Dangerous_, cast a Stygian hue over _St. Ronan's
Well, The Fair Maid of Perth_, and _Anne of Geierstein_, which lowers
them, the first altogether, the other two at frequent intervals, into
fellowship with the normal disease which festers throughout the whole
body of our lower fictitious literature.

Fictitious! I use the ambiguou