ill-luck. Inventions lacked the vivifying principle—truth; and the inevitable consequence was, the copied and the common-place. "Waverley" was the avater of a new era; and established, as it now is, among our English classics, justice cannot be done to its merits without reference to its contemporaries—"the dwindled race of little men"—the hewers of wood, and the drawers of water, where their great forefathers had planted the forest, and sank the "pure well of English undefiled."
"Waverley" was at once a novel of character, like those of Fielding and Richardson; and one of adventure, like those of Defoe; but it had that peculiar stamp of its own which genius alone can give. Founded, like the old ballads, on tradition, it entered the province of poetry, while the time in which it was written gave enlightenment, and the writer's mind its own shrewdness, sharpened by that dry humour which is essentially of Scottish growth. Scott is the founder of a new school—the picturesque, which now, more or less, influences all our writers. "Waverley" was a succession of pictures—both landscape and portrait—indeed all his characters give the idea of portraits rather than of inventions.
Flora Mac Ivor belongs to poetry—poetry which takes the highest order of qualities, to fashion into beauty, and quicken into life. It was the first attempt to give the ideal to female character in
