will bring your brother along with you also. Sir Walter is always inquiring for you, and desiring to be remembered. It is worth while to travel some miles, I assure you, to see the Minstrel in his glory.. My wife has got a donkey-cart, in which she will drive you in great style." Meanwhile, Williams (who was tutor to Charles Scott in Wales) had been married, and was reported to be flourishing greatly. Mrs. Lockhart, according to Sir Walter (August 7, 1821), was "ordering old Cocka-Pistol" (the gardener) about, and directing all things "with the solemn fuss of an old managing dowager."1 At about this time, Sir Walter returned the proof sheets of "Valerius" to Lockhart. "They are most classical and interesting at the same time, and cannot but produce a very deep sensation. I am quite delighted with the reality of your Romans.”: The "sensation" produced by "Valerius” was not wide, whether it was deep or not, and the "reality" of the Romans probably was not in their favour. No novel of classical times, except "Hypatia," has ever been popular, and "Hypatia" (as Mr. Saintsbury observes) "makes its interests and its personages daringly modern." "Valerius," on the other hand, reads like a 1 Cock-a-Pistol was so called from his cottage, on the site of the last great clan battle of the Border. 2 "Letters," ii. 125. 3 "The Last Days of Pompeii" is another exception. translation from the Latin, as it purports to be, an admirable translation, but remote in style from all that the novel-reader knows and likes. In Sir Walter's own novels, the historical characters, when they do not speak Scots, or converse in a kind of conventional lingua franca of medievalism, discourse in the style of Sir Walter's own period. But a mind like Lockhart's was almost certain to aim at a manner not too distant from that of the Latin classics. In fact, as one reads "Valerius," one is always turning it into Latin prose! The story tells how the son of a Roman officer and a British bride leaves the paternal villa in Albion, and visits Rome. He sups with a patrician, who says, "You would observe the palmbranches at my door. They were won to-day by a five hours' harangue before the Centumviri." Now the Centumviri (according to the Dictionary) were a bench of judges who decided in civil suits. The novel-reader does not care to pursue his studies in fiction with the aid of a Latin Dictionary. "Local colour" does not excite him, when it is borrowed from Horace, Juvenal, Tacitus, and Petronius Arbiter. A Stoic, who is present at the supper, accidentally strikes the corner of the table with his knee, “which elicited from his stubborn features a sudden contortion." It must, indeed, have been pleasant to watch a professional Stoic, when suddenly obliged to recognise that "whatsoever is agreeable to the universe," as a knock on the knee-pan and the resulting sensation-may be highly disagreeable to a philosophic citizen of the universe. But, in a romance of classic times, the novel-reader is constantly thrown out by want of knowledge,-Pour entendre il fallait avoir cette lumière-and the more learned the romance the less is the novel-reader entertained. The slave of old Roman comedy, and his amorous young master, reappear in "Valerius," but, if they now enliven only a few readers in Plautus, in a modern work of fiction their chance of success is slight indeed. The pleaders in the Forum may be Jeffreys and Cranstouns in togas, but the long sermon of an Epicurean philosopher in an arbour, has no merit beyond resembling the long sermons of Epicurean and other philosophers. They are fatiguing in Plutarch's essays, and in a novel they fatigue, though they are needed as a contrast to the early Christian views of the heroine. Once interested in her, and by the gallant bearing of a condemned Christian, the hero has no heart for the gladiatorial sports of the arena, where the ladies eat comfits above the butchery, and the philosophers perorate and quote Greek, and the early Christian dies for his creed, after delivering an address of considerable length. The many pictures of Roman life which follow are, in essence, correct, but somewhat cold and far away. Though the book was hardly "damned," as Lockhart briefly expresses it, still, he had not |