ever-amiable verse Beauty hovers and trembles, and who has shed the purple light of Fancy, from his ambrosial wings over all nature? What is there of the might of Milton, whose head is canopied in the blue serene, and who takes us to sit with him there? Sir Walter has no voluntary power of combination: all his associations (as we said before) are those of habit or of tradition. He is a merely narrative and descriptive poet, garrulous of the old time. The definition of his poetry is a pleasing superficiality.

Not so of his "NOVELS AND RoMANCES.” There we turn over a new leaf-another and the same-the same in matter, but in form, in power how different! The Author of Waverley has got rid of the tagging of rhymes, the eking out of syllables, the supplying of epithets, the colours of style, the grouping of his characters, and the regular march of events, and comes to the point at once, and strikes at the heart of his subject, without dismay and without disguise. His poetry was a lady's waiting-maid, dressed out in cast off finery: his prose is a beautiful, rustic nymph, that, like Dorothea in Don Quixote, when she is surprised with dishevelled tresses bathing her naked feet in the brook, looks round her abashed at the admiration her charms have excited. The grand secret of the author's success in these latter productions is that he has completely got rid of the trammels of authorship; and torn off at one rent (as Lord Peter got rid of so many yards of lace in the "Tale of a Tub") all the ornaments of fine writing and worn-out sentimentality. All is fresh, as from the hand of nature: by going a century or two back and laying the scene in a remote and uncultivated district, all becomes new and startling in the present advanced period. Highland manDers, character, scenery, superstitions, northern dialect and costume, the wars, the religion, and politics of the 16th and 17th centuries, gave a charming and wholesome relief to the fastidious refinement and "over-laboured lassitude” of modern readers, like the effect of plunging a nervous valetudinarian

30 ATHENEUM VOL. 1. new series.

into a cold-bath. The Scotch Novels, for this reason, are not so much admired in Scotland as in England. The contrast, the transition is less striking. From the top of the Calton-Hill, the inhabitants of "Auld Reekie" can descry, or fancy they descry, the peaks of Ben Lomond and the waving outline of Rob Roy's country: we who live at the southern extremity of the island can only catch a glimpse of the billowy scene in the descriptions of the author of Waverley. The mountain air is most bracing to our languid nerves, and it is brought us in shiploads from the neighbourhood of Ab. bot's-Ford. There is another circumstance to be taken into the account. In Edinburgh there is a little opposition, and something of the spirit of cabal between the partisans of works proceeding from Mr. Constable's and Mr. Blackwood's shops. Mr. Constable gives the highest prices, but, being the Whig bookseller, it is grudged that he should do so. An attempt is therefore made to transfer a certain share of popularity to the second-rate Scotch novels, issuing from Mr. Blackwood's shop. 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

his silence, and Mr. Bartoline Saddletree and his prudent help-mate, and Porteous swinging in the wind, and Madge Wildfire, full of finery and madness, and her ghastly mother-again, there is Meg Merrilies, standing on her rock, stretched on her bier with "her head to the East," and Dirk Hatteraick (equal to Shakspeare's Master Barnardine) and Glossin, the soul of an attorney, and Dandy Dinmont with his terrier-pack and his pony Dumple, and the fiery Colonel Mannering, and the modish old Counsellor Pleydell, and Dominie Sampson*-and Rob Roy (like the eagle in his eyrie) and Baillie Nicol Jarvie, and the inimitable Major Galbraith, and Rashleigh Osbaldistone and Die Vernon, the best of secretkeepers; and in "The Antiquary," the ingenious and abstruse Mr. Jonathan Oldbuck, and the old beadsman, Edie Ochiltree, and that preternatural figure old Edith Elspeth, a living shadow, in whom the lamp of life had been long extinguished, but that it is fed by remorse and deepening recollections, and that striking picture of the effects of feudal tyranny and fiendish pride, the unhappy earl of Glenallan; and the Black Dwarf, and his friend Habbie of the Heughfoot, the cheerful hunter, and his cousin, Grace Armstrong, fresh and laughing like the morning; and the "Children of the Mist," and the bay* Perhaps the finest scene in all these novels is that where the Dominie meets his pupil Miss Lucy the morning after her brother's arrival.

ing of the blood-hound that tracks their steps at a distance (the hollow echoes are in our ears now,) and Amy and her hapless love and the villain Varney, and the deep voice of George of Douglas that addressed these words to Mary Queen of Scots-" Your Majesty wished for Rosabel to assist you in your flight, and Rosabel is here!"-and the immoveable Balafré and Master Oliver the Barber, and the quaint humour of "The Fortunes of Nigel," and the comic spirit of " Peveril of the Peak," &c. &c. &c. What a host of associations! What a thing is human life! What a power is that of genius! What a world of thought and feeling rescued (almost) from oblivion! How many hours of wholesome heartfelt amusement has our author given to the gay and thoughtless! How many sad hearts has he soothed in pain and solitude! It is no wonder that the public repay with lengthened applause and gratitude the pleasure they receive. He writes as fast as they can read, and he does not write himself down. He is always in the public eye, and they do not tire of him. His worst is better than any other person's best. His backgrounds (and his latter works are little else but backgrounds capitally made out) are more attractive than the principal figures and most complicated actions of other writers. His works, taken together, are almost like a new edition of human nature. This is indeed to be an author!

**

Ε

vels. I suppress the circumstances which have hitherto rendered our residence in Egypt very disagreeable. Our greatest enemies have been, to me a very violent nervous fever, and to both of us opthalmic attacks, which have lasted several months. Nevertheless, although two of our companions are dead, and three others who supplied their places have lost courage and quitted us, we preserve our firmness, and advance with prudence. As

above all things you recommended us to examine into the poisons known in Egypt, we have already dried the leaves of the venomous plants most known in this country. We have carefully collected in flasks the juice of such of those plants as are milky. We have also obtained some yellowish green juice extracted from the teeth of the Cerastes, (horned snake,) and have begun to preserve some scorpions' fangs, as well as the vessels which serve as a receptacle for the poison. Of scorpions we have hitherto met with only eight kinds: five in the desert of Lybia, and near Alexandria, the largest on the frontiers of Barbary, near Gasi Choitrebie; and three between Cairo and Essian. All these scorpions are yellow, tending to a blackish brown; and we have had abundant opportunities of examining them. Those which are found in the higher Egypt are considered the most venomous; and as that which we have distinguished by the name of Scorpio Cabrisimus is the largest and the most common, it is probable that all the others are derived from it. A Frenchman, M. Rufean, or Rousseau, who employs himself in looking for Egyptian antiquities, and in copying objects of natural history, at Luxos, near Thebes, told us that one of his young female blacks had just died in the most severe pain, in consequence of the sting of a scorpion; and that he had known of several other occurrences of a similar nature within a very short period of time. I myself, who had with great caution taken above a hundred of these animals in my hands, was lately stung in the finger by one of them. At the moment of the puncture I experienced a penetrating pain, which staggered me like an electric shock. Although I did not neglect to suck the wound with force until the ap

pearance of blood, the feeling of pain became still more intense in the course of a few minutes. I bound the finger tightly up. The pain, which still continued, extended itself by degrees to the hand, and afterwards to the elbow; and to the interior part of the arm, and resembled a kind of cramp. At the end of an hour I experienced this severe pain only in the neighbourhood of the wound, the lips of which began to swell. At the end of three hours, all that remained was a sensation of numbness in the finger, which went off on the following day. I do not know whether an inclination to sleep that experienced in the evening was attributable to the wound, or to a catarrh which had shown itself. We were witnesses of another occurrence of the same nature at the village of Saulim, in the province of Trajan. One evening the Kaimakahn entered our apartment, crying out and entreating help. He had been stung by a venomous animal, and was suffering great pain. Dr. Hemprich made, at the wounded place of the finger, an incision, which bled copiously, and then bound the finger up. The next day the injured man found himself completely healed. Our search for the scorpion by which he was stung was fruitless. It appears that in general the sting of the scorpion is more dangerous to children than to grown persons. When the Arabs meet snakes or scorpions, they hold them down with a stick or some other instrument, and break their fangs with stones or a knife. We never saw a venomous animal in the hands of an Arab which was not mutilated; and therefore when the snake-swallowers, or other Arabs, have brought us these animals, we have seldom preserved them in spirits of wine. We are at present busy in collecting details with respect to these various subjects.