When I Think Of That Novel And
That Evening, I Am Impatient With All Others; They Seem But Shadows
And
Impostors; they cannot satisfy the appetite which this
awakened; and I dare be known to think it the best of
Sir Walter's
by nearly as much as Sir Walter is the best of novelists. Perhaps
Mr. Lang is right, and our first friends in the land of fiction are
always the most real. And yet I had read before this Guy
Mannering, and some of Waverley, with no such delighted sense of
truth and humour, and I read immediately after the greater part of
the Waverley Novels, and was never moved again in the same way or
to the same degree. One circumstance is suspicious: my critical
estimate of the Waverley Novels has scarce changed at all since I
was ten. Rob Roy, Guy Mannering, and Redgauntlet first; then, a
little lower; The Fortunes of Nigel; then, after a huge gulf,
Ivanhoe and Anne of Geierstein: the rest nowhere; such was the
verdict of the boy. Since then The Antiquary, St. Ronan's Well,
Kenilworth, and The Heart of Midlothian have gone up in the scale;
perhaps Ivanhoe and Anne of Geierstein have gone a trifle down;
Diana Vernon has been added to my admirations in that enchanted
world of Rob Roy; I think more of the letters in Redgauntlet, and
Peter Peebles, that dreadful piece of realism, I can now read about
with equanimity, interest, and I had almost said pleasure, while to
the childish critic he often caused unmixed distress.
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