people, to the imputation of not being wholly untouched himself by the national superstitions. Yet how much would the whole scene have lost in its permanent effect if the author had attempted an explanation of the apparition on the ground of an optical illusion not infrequent among the mountain mists of the Highlands, or any other of the ingenious solutions so readily at the command of the thoroughbred story-teller!
It must be acknowledged, however, that this way of solving the riddles of romance would hardly be admissible in a story drawn from familiar scenes and situations in modern life, and especially in our own country. The lights of education are flung too bright and broad over the land to allow any lurking-hole for the shadows of a twilight age. So much the worse for the poet and the novelist. Their province roust now be confined to poor human nature, without meddling with the "Gorgons and chimeras dire" which floated through the bewildered brains of our forefathers, at least on the other side of the water. At any rate, if a writer, in this broad sunshine, ventures on any sort of diablerie, he is forced to explain it by all the thousand contrivances of trapdoors, secret passages, waxen images, and other makeshifts from the property-room of Mrs. Radcliffe and Company.
Brown, indeed, has resorted to a somewhat higher mode of elucidating his mysteries by a remarkable phenomenon of our nature. But the misfortune of all these attempts to account for the marvels of the
