contemporary crop of romancers who have followed the leadership of
Dumas. There has, indeed, been a great and inspiriting revival of
romance in our time, but it is partly frustrated in almost every case by
this rooted conception that romance consists in the vast multiplication
of incidents and the violent acceleration of narrative. The heroes of
Mr. Stanley Weyman scarcely ever have their swords out of their hands;
the deeper presence of romance is far better felt when the sword is at
the hip ready for innumerable adventures too terrible to be pictured.
The Stanley Weyman hero has scarcely time to eat his supper except in
the act of leaping from a window or whilst his other hand is employed in
lunging with a rapier. In Scott's heroes, on the other hand, there is no
characteristic so typical or so worthy of humour as their disposition to
linger over their meals. The conviviality of the Clerk of Copmanhurst
or of Mr. Pleydell, and the thoroughly solid things they are described
as eating, is one of the most perfect of Scott's poetic touches. In
short, Mr. Stanley Weyman is filled with the conviction that the sole
essence of romance is to move with insatiable rapidity from incident to
incident. In the truer romance of Scott there is more of the sentiment
of "Oh! still delay, thou art so fair"! more of a certain patriarchal
enjoyment of things as they are--of the sword by the side and the
wine-cup in the hand. Romance, indeed, does not consist by any means so
much in experiencing adventures as in being ready for them. How little
the actual boy cares for incidents in comparison to tools and weapons
may be tested by the fact that the most popular story of adventure is
concerned with a man who lived for years on a desert island with two
guns and a sword, which he never had to use on an enemy.

Closely connected with this is one of the charges most commonly brought
against Scott, particularly in his own day--the charge of a fanciful
and monotonous insistence upon the details of armour and costume. The