Some years ago, while preparing a lecture on “The Landmarks of Scott,” I found myself confronted with twenty-six novels and five well-known poems, besides innumerable essays and histories, all demanding at least a passing word. I saw that two minutes devoted to each would more than fill my lecture hour, and leave no room for the frame-work, viz: Loch Katrine, Loch Lomond, the Trosachs, Melrose, Edinboro, the Yarrow, the Ettrick, the Tweed, and the Border Country, where the Percy and the Douglas fought. It then occurred to me that Scott had unconsciously prepared a panoramic history of Europe from the time of the Crusades to the year 1812. Acting upon this suggestion I examined the novels and poems and found to my great delight, that with here and there an absent link of fifty or a hundred years the chain was almost perfect. I condensed the prominent features of eight hundred years, tracing their connection with Scott’s graphic pictures into a pen-sketch of ten minutes, and I have been gratified to see that this idea of chronological order has been recently followed by one of the leading New York publishers. It is my object in a series of articles to elaborate this historical sequence from the time of “Count Robert of Paris” (1094) down to “St. Ronan’s Well” (1812), and to point out in passing some of the beauties of the great author. If the reader of these articles will follow with me the romances to which I refer, I think he will say, at the close of the series, that he has found in the Waverley Novels a vivid picture of the events and customs of Europe, from the days of the crusades down to a time within the memory of men still living. M. Augustin Thierry, one of the most philosophical essayists of France, has eloquently said: “There are scenes of such simplicity, of such living truth, to be found, that notwithstanding the distance of the period in which the author places himself, they can be realized without effort. It is because in the midst of the world which no longer exists, Walter Scott always places the world which does, and always will exist; that is to say, human nature, of which he knows all the secrets. Everything peculiar to the time and place, the exterior of men, and aspect of the country and of the habitations, costumes and manners, are described with the most minute truthfulness; and yet the immense erudition, which has furnished so many details, is nowhere to be perceived. Walter Scott seems to have for the past that second sight, which, in times of ignorance, men attributed to themselves for the future. To say that there is more real history in his novels on Scotland and England than in the philosophically false compilations, which still possess that great name, is not advancing anything strange in the eyes of those who have read and understood “Old Mortality,” “Waverley,” “Rob Roy,” the ”Fortunes of Nigel,” and the “Heart of Mid Lothian.”