[30] "And goblin brats, of Gilpin Horner's brood,
Decoy young border-nobles through the wood,
And skip at every step, Lord knows how high,
And frighten foolish babes, the Lord knows why."
[31] "Now leave we Margaret and her knight
To tell you of the approaching fight."—Canto Fifth, xiii.
[32] Landor says oddly of Warton that he "had lost his ear by laying it down on low swampy places, on ballads and sonnets."
[33] Does not the quarrel of Richard and Philip in "The Talisman" remind one irresistibly of Achilles and Agamemnon in the "Iliad"?
[34] For a review of English historical fiction before Scott, consult Professor Cross' "Development of the English Novel," pp. 110-114.
[35] "Familiar Studies of Men and Books," by R. L. Stevenson. Article, "Victor Hugo's Romances."
[36] "Le Roman Historique à l'Epoque Romantique." Essai sur l'influence de Walter Scott. Par Louis Maigron. Paris (Hachette). 1898, p. 331, note. And ibid., p. 330: "Au lieu que les classiques s'efforçaient toujours, à travers les modifications que les pays, les temps et les circonstances peuvent apporter aux sentiments et aux passions des hommes, d'atteindre à ce que ces passions et ces sentiments conservent de permanent, d'immuable et d'éternel, c'est au contraire à l'expression de l'accidentel et du relatif que les novateurs devaient les efforts de leur art. Plus simplement, à la place de la vérité humaine, ils devaient mettre la vérité locale." Professor Herford says that what Scott "has in common with the Romantic temper is simply the feeling for the picturesque, for colour, for contrast." "Age of Wordsworth," p. 121.
[37] De Quincey defines picturesque as "the characteristic pushed into a sensible excess." The word began to excite discussion in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. See vol. i., p. 185, for Gilpin's "Observations on Picturesque Beauty." See also Uvedale Price, "Essays on the Picturesque as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful," three vols., 1794-96. Price finds the character of the picturesque to consist in roughness, irregularity, intricacy, and sudden variation. Gothic buildings are more picturesque than Grecian, and a ruin than an entire building. Hovels, cottages, mills, interiors of old barns are picturesque. "In mills particularly, such is the extreme intricacy of the wheels and the wood work: such is the singular variety of forms and of lights and shadows, of mosses and weather stains from the constant moisture, of plants springing from the rough joints of the stones—that, even without the addition of water, an old mill has the greatest charm for a painter" (i., 55). He mentions, as a striking example of picturesque beauty, a hollow lane or by-road with broken banks, thickets, old neglected pollards, fantastic roots bared by the winter torrents, tangled trailers and wild plants, and infinite variety of tints and shades (i., 23-29). He denounces the improvements of Capability Brown (see "Romanticism," vol. i., p. 124): especially the clump, the belt and regular serpentine walks with smooth turf edges, the made water with uniformly sloping banks—all as insipidly formal, in their way, as the old Italian gardens which Brown's landscapes displaced.
[38] "Essay on Walter Scott."
[39] Andrew Lang reminds us that, after all, only three of the Waverley Novels are "chivalry romances." The following are the only numbers of the series that have to do with the Middle Ages: "Count Robert of Paris," circa 1090 A.D.; "The Betrothed," 1187; "The Talisman," 1193; "Ivanhoe," 1194; "The Fair Maid of Perth," 1402; "Quentin Durward," 1470; "Anne of Geierstein," 1474-77.