l these jeers are offensive to
generous feeling, and in the mouth of Clara are intolerable. Lockhart
remarked in Scott a singular bluntness of the sense of smell and of
taste. He could drink corked wine without a suspicion that there was
anything wrong with it. This curious obtuseness of a physical sense, in
one whose eyesight was so keen, who, "aye was the first to find the
hare" in coursing, seems to correspond with his want of lightness in the
invention of _badinage_. He tells us that, for a long while at least, he
had been unacquainted with the kind of society, the idle, useless
underbred society, of watering-places. Are we to believe that the
company at Gilsland, for instance, where he met and wooed Miss
Charpentier, was like the company at St. Ronan's? Lockhart vouches for
the snobbishness, "the mean admiration of mean things," the devotion to
the slimmest appearances of rank. All this is credible enough, but, if
there existed a society as dull and base as that which we meet in the
pages of "Mr. Soapy Sponge," and Surtees's other novels, assuredly it
was no theme for the great and generous spirit of Sir Walter. The worst
kind of manners always prevail among people whom moderns call "the
second-rate smart," and these are drawn in "St. Ronan's Well." But we
may believe that, even there, manners are no longer quite so hideous as
in the little Tweedside watering-place. The extinction of duelling has
destroyed, or nearly destroyed, the swaggering style of truculence;
people could not behave as Mowbray and Sir Bingo behave to Tyrrel, in
the after-dinner scene. The Man of Peace, the great MacTurk, with his
harangues translated from the language of Ossian, is no longer needed,
and no longer possible. Supposing manners to be correctly described in
"St. Ronan's," the pessimist himself must admit that manners have
improved. But it is not without regret that we see a genius born for
chivalry labouring in this unworthy and alien matter.

The English critics delighted to accuse Scott of having committed
literary suicide. He had only stepped off the path to which he presently
returned. He was unfitted to write the domestic novel, and even in "St.
Ronan's" he introduces events of romantic improbability. These enable
him to depict scenes of the most passionate tragedy, as in the meeting
of Clara and Tyrrel. They who have loved so blindly and so kindly should
never have met, or never parted. It is like a tragic rendering of the
sce