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 endeavors 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.

13. Fictitious! I use the ambiguous word deliberately; for it is
impossible to distinguish in these tales of the prison-house how far
their vice and gloom are thrown into their manufacture only to meet a
vile demand, and how far they are an integral condition of thought in
the minds of men trained from their youth up in the knowledge of
Londinian and Parisian misery. The speciality of the plague is a delight
in the exposition of the relations between guilt and decrepitude; and I
call the results of it literature "of the prison-house," because the
thwarted habits of body and mind, which are the punishment of reckless
crowding in cities, become, in the issue of that punishment, frightful
subjects of exclusive interest to themselves; and the art of fiction in
which they finally delight is only the more studied arrangement and
illustration, by colored fire-lights, of the daily bulletins of their
own wretchedness, in the prison calendar, the police news, and the
hospital report.

14. The reader will perhaps be surprised at my separating the greatest
work of Dickens, "Oliver Twist," with honor, from the loathsome mass to
which it typically belongs. That book is an earnest and uncaricatured
record of states of criminal life, written with didactic purpose, full
of the g