those who pursue one beaten track, in all cases, must necessarily fail in a very large proportion of them; and still further accounts for the bad success formerly attending the operation of extraction on the pensioners.'

It is true that the mode in which the result of Mr. Adams's successful experiments at Greenwich is made public, without a com plete description of the nature of the operations performed, and with formal attestations of the truth of the facts adduced, appears to us to be somewhat beneath the dignity of regular practice: but the report of that result being so highly favourable, and so perfectly well authenticated, we have thought it our duty to overcome the reluctance which this approach to the garb of empiricism had created, and to contribute our part towards rendering more public the merits of an operator so skilful and ingenious as Mr. Adams, now Sir William, has proved himself to be.

ART. VII. Waverley; or, 'tis Sixty Years since. 3 vols. 12mo. Edinburgh. 1814.

We have had so many occasions to invite our readers' attention

to that species of composition called Novels, and have so often stated our general views of the principles of this very agreeable branch of literature, that we shall venture on the consideration of our present subject with but a few observations, and those applicable to a class of novels, of which it is a favourable specimen.

The earlier novelists wrote at periods when society was not perfectly formed, and we find that their picture of life was an embodying of their own conceptions of the 'beau idéal.'-Heroes all generosity, and ladies all chastity, exalted above the vulgarities of society and nature, maintain, through eternal folios, their visionary virtues, without the stain of any moral frailty, or the degra dation of any human necessities. But this high-flown style went out of fashion as the great mass of mankind became more informed of each other's feelings and concerns, and as a nearer intercourse taught them that the real course of human life is a conflict of duty and desire, of virtue and passion, of right and wrong; in the description of which it is difficult to say whether uniform virtue or unredeemed vice would be in the greater degree tedious and absurd.

The novelist next endeavoured to exhibit a general view of society. The characters in Gil Blas and Tom Jones are not individuals so much as specimens of the human race; and these delightful works have been, are, and ever will be popular, because they present lively and accurate delineations of the workings of the

human soul, and that every man who reads them is obliged to confess to himself, that in similar circumstances with the personages of La Sage and Fielding, he would probably have acted in the way in which they are described to have done.

From this species the transition to a third was natural. The first class was theory-it was improved into a generic description, and that again led the way to a more particular classification-a copying not of man in general, but of men of a peculiar nation, profession, or temper, or, to go a step farther-of individuals.

Thus Alcander and Cyrus could never have existed in human society-they are neither French, nor English, nor Italian, because it is only allegorically that they are men. Tom Jones might have been a Frenchman, and Gil Blas an Englishman, because the essence of their characters is human nature, and the personal situation of the individual is almost indifferent to the success of the object which the author proposed to himself: while, on the other hand, the characters of the most popular novels of later times are Irish, or Scotch, or French, and not in the abstract, men.-The general operations of nature are circumscribed to her effects on an individual character, and the modern novels of this class, compared with the broad and noble style of the earlier writers, may be considered as Dutch pictures, delightful in their vivid and minute details of common life, wonderfully entertaining to the close ob server of peculiarities, and highly creditable to the accuracy, observation, and humour of the painter, but exciting none of those more exalted feelings, giving none of those higher views of the human soul which delight and exalt the mind of the spectator of Raphael, Correggio, or Murillo.

But as in a gallery we are glad to see every style of excellence, and are ready to amuse ourselves with Teniers and Gerard Dow, so we derive great pleasure from the congenial delineations of Castle Rack-rent and Waverley; and we are well assured that any reader who is qualified to judge of the illustration we have borrowed from a sister art, will not accuse us of undervaluing, by this comparison, either Miss Edgeworth or the ingenious author of the work now under consideration. We mean only to say, that the line of writing which they have adopted is less comprehensive and less sublime, but not that it is less entertaining or less useful than that of their predecessors. On the contrary, so far as utility constitutes merit in a novel, we have no hesitation in preferring the moderns to their predecessors. We do not believe that any man or woman was ever improved in morals or manners by the reading of Tom Jones or Peregrine Pickle, though we are confident that many have profited by the Tales of Fashionable Life, and the Cottagers of Glenburnie.

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We have heard Waverley called a Scotch Castle Rack-rent; and we have ourselves alluded to a certain resemblance between these works; but we must beg leave to explain that the resemblance consists only in this, that the one is a description of the peculiarities of Scottish manners as the other is of those of Ireland; and that we are far from placing on the same level the merits and qualities of the works. Waverley is of a much higher strain, and may be safely placed far above the amusing vulgarity of Castle Rackrent, and by the side of Ennui or the Absentee, the best undoubtedly of Miss Edgeworth's compositions.

We shall now proceed to give our readers a general view of the story, together with extracts of such particular passages as will best convey to them the peculiarities of the author's object and style.

Waverley is a young Englishman of an ancient and affluent family, which had the misfortune of deserving the glory or the disgrace conferred by the title of Jacobite.

Circumstances, too numerous and too minute for recapitulation, give to his mind a romantic, vacillating, and dilatory propensity, and he enters the world very little skilled in the ways of mankind, and almost as little conscious of his own character.

About the year 1744 he leaves the seat of his tory ancestors with a troop of dragoons raised on their estate, to join in Scotland a regiment of horse in which he had obtained a captain's commission.

But besides his commission he took with him a writing of a very different tendency in its character and consequences-a letter of recommendation from his uncle, Sir Everard Waverley, to an old friend and fellow-sufferer 'in the good cause of the Stuarts,' a Mr. Cosmo Comyne Bradwardine, better known, it appears, in Scotland, by the title of the Baron of Bradwardine, or the territorial appellative of Tully-Veolan.

Young Waverley takes an early opportunity of proceeding to pay his respects to his uncle's friend, and obtains, for that purpose, leave of absence from his regiment, which he never after rejoins. We shall now introduce to our readers, in the lively description of the author himself, the Baron of Bradwardine :

'He was a tall, thin, athletic figure, old indeed and gray-haired, but with every muscle rendered as tough as whip-cord by constant exercise. He was dressed carelessly, and more like a Frenchman than an Eng. lishman of the period, while from his hard features and perpendicular rigidity of stature, he bore some resemblance to a Swiss officer of the guards, who had resided some time at Paris, and caught the costume, but not the ease or manner of its inhabitants. The truth was, that his language and habits were as heterogeneous as his external appearance.

Owing to his natural disposition to study, or perhaps to a very ge

neral Scottish fashion of giving young men of rank a legal education, he had been bred with a view to the bar. But the politics of his family precluding the hope of his rising in that profession, Mr. Bradwardine travelled for several years, and made five campaigns in foreign service. After his demelée with the law of high treason in 1715, he had lived in retirement, conversing almost entirely with those of his own principles in the vicinage. To this must be added the prejudices of ancient birth and jacobite politics, greatly strengthened by habits of solitary and secluded authority, which, though exercised only within the bounds of his half-cultivated estate, was there indisputable and undisputed.'-Vol. i. p. 130.

At his first address to Waverley, it would seem that the hearty pleasure he felt to behold the nephew of his friend had somewhat discomposed the stiff and upright dignity of the Baron of Bradwardine's demeanour, for the tears stood in the old gentleman's eyes, when, having first shaken Edward heartily by the hand in the English fashion, he embraced him a-la-mode Françoise, and kissed him on both sides of the face; while the hardness of his gripe, and the quantity of Scotch snuff which his accolade communicated, called corresponding drops of moisture to the eyes of his guest. "Upon the honour of a gentleman,” he said, “ but it makes me young again to see you here, Mr. Waverley! A worthy scion of the old stock of WaverleyHonour-spes altera, as Maro hath it-and you have the look of the old line, Captain Waverley; not so portly yet as my old friend Sir Everard-mais cela viendra avec le tems as my Dutch acquaintance, Baron Kikkitbroeck, said of the sagesse of Madame son épouse.—And so ye have mounted the cockade? Right, right; though I could have wished the colour different, and so I would ha' deemed might Sir Everard. But no more of that; I am old, and times are changed.— And how does the worthy knight baronet and the fair Mrs. Rachel? Ah, ye laugh, young man; but she was the fair Mrs. Rachel in the year of grace seventeen hundred and sixteen; but time passes-et But once again, ye singula predantur anni—that is most certain. are most heartily welcome to my poor house of Tully-Veolan!-Hie to the house, Rose, and see that Alexander Saunderson looks out the old Chateau Margoux, which I sent from Bordeaux to Dundee in the year 1713."-Vol. i. pp. 130–132.

The mentioned in the last sentence under the name of person Rose, was Miss Bradwardine, an amiable young lady, who, in the due process of the book, becomes Mrs. Waverley, but of whom it will not be necessary, nor would it be very practicable, to give our readers any much more extended account. Modesty, gentleness, good nature, and good temper, compose an excellent wife, but they are, fortunately for mankind, qualifications and merits of too ordinary occurrence to be of much use to those moral caricaturists called writers of novels. We, therefore, hasten from the character which, in real life, would most attach us, to a description of the uncouth personages who partook with Waverley the wild hospitalities of Tully-Veolan.

These, as the Baron assured his young friend, were very estimable persons. "There was the young Laird of Balmawhapple, a Falconer by surname, of the house of Glenfarquhar, given right much to fieldsports-gaudet equis et canibus-but a very discreet young gentleman. Then there was the Laird of Killancureit, who had devoted his leisure untill tillage and agriculture. He is, as ye may well suppose from such a tendency, but of yeoman extraction-servabit odorem testa diu-and I believe, between ourselves, his grandsire was from the wrong side of the Border-one Bullsegg, who came hither as a steward, or bailiff, or ground officer, or something in that department, to the last Girnigo, of Killancureit, who died of an atrophy. After his master's death, sir,— ye would hardly believe such a scandal,-but this Bullsegg, being portly and comely of aspect, intermarried with the lady dowager, who was young and amorous, and possessed himself of the estate, which devolved on this unhappy woman by a settlement of her unwhile husband, in direct contravention of an unrecorded taillie, and to the prejudice of the disponer's own flesh and blood, in the person of his natural heir and seventh cousin, Girnigo of Tipperhewit, whose family was so reduced by the ensuing law-suit, that his representative is now serving as a private gentleman sentinel in the Highland Black Watch. But this gentleman, Mr. Bullsegg of Killancureit that now is, hath good blood in his veins by the mother and grandmother, who were both of the family of Pickletillim, and he is well liked and looked upon, and knows his own place. There is, besides, a clergyman of the true (though suffering) episcopal church of Scotland. He was a confessor in her cause after the year 1715, when a whiggish mob destroyed his meeting-house, tore his surplice, and plundered his dwelling-place of four silver spoons, intromitting also with his mart and his meal-ark, and with two barrels, one of single and one of double ale, besides three bottles of brandy. My baron baillie and doer, Mr. Duncan Macwheeble, is the fourth of our list."

'As thus he described them by person and name,

They enter'd; and dinner was served as they came.' 'The Baron eat like a famished soldier, the Laird of Balmawhapple like a sportsman, Bullsegg of Killancureit like a farmer, Waverley himself like a traveller, and Baillie Macwheeble eat like all four together.

'When the dinner was removed, the baron announced the health of the king, politely leaving to the consciences of his guests to drink to the sovereign de facto or de jure, as their politics inclined. The conversation now became general: and, shortly afterwards, Miss Bradwardine, who had done the honours with natural grace and simplicity, retired, and was soon followed by the clergyman. Among the rest of the party, the wine, which fully justified the encomiums of the landlord, flowed freely round, although Waverley, with some difficulty, obtained the privilege of sometimes neglecting his glass. At length, as the evening grew more late, the Baron made a private signal to Mr. Saunders Saunderson, or, as he facetiously denominated him, Alexander ab Alexandro, who left the room with a nod, and soon after returned, his grave countenance mantling with a solemn and mysterious smile, and placed before