contracted to produce that very uncommon sensation in the mind,—a wish that they were longer. “The religious opinions expressed in the course of the tale are few, but of those few we fully approve. “The humorous and happy adaptation of legal terms shows no moderate acquaintance with the arcana of the law, and a perpetual allusion to the English and Latin classics no common share of scholarship and taste.” The “Scots Magazine” illustrated the admirable unanimity of reviewers when they _are_ unanimous. The “Anti-jacobin” objected that no Château-Margaux sent in the wood from Bordeaux to Dundee in 1713 could have been drinkable in 1745. “Claret two-and-thirty years old! It almost gives us the gripes to think of it.” Indeed, Sir Walter, as Lochhart assures us, was so far from being a judge of claret that he could not tell when it was “corked.” One or two points equally important amused the reviewer, who, like most of his class, detected the hand of Scott. There was hardly a possibility, as Mr. Morritt told Sir Walter, “that the poems in ‘Waverley’ could fail to suggest their author. No man who ever heard you tell a story over a table but must recognize you at once.” To his praise of “Waverley” Mr. Morritt hardly added any adverse criticism, beyond doubting the merit of the early chapters, and denouncing the word “sombre” as one which had lately “kept bad company among the slipshod English of the sentimental school.” Scott, in defence, informed Mr. Morritt that he had “left the story to flag in the first volume on purpose. . . . I wished (with what success Heaven knows) to avoid the ordinary error of novelists, whose first volume is usually their best.”