an altered title. It is very unlikely that any of his readers should have
encountered, and still more so that they should remember, this trifle. The
bare possibility, however, he has ventured to anticipate by this brief
explanation, lest he should be charged with plagiarism--always a disrespect
to a reader.

May he be permitted a few words also of remonstrance against the
promiscuous application of the term 'sensation' to that large school of
fiction which transgresses no one of those canons of construction and
morality which, in producing the unapproachable 'Waverley Novels,' their
great author imposed upon himself? No one, it is assumed, would describe
Sir Walter Scott's romances as 'sensation novels;' yet in that marvellous
series there is not a single tale in which death, crime, and, in some form,
mystery, have not a place.

Passing by those grand romances of 'Ivanhoe,' 'Old Mortality,' and
'Kenilworth,' with their terrible intricacies of crime and bloodshed,
constructed with so fine a mastery of the art of exciting suspense and
horror, let the reader pick out those two exceptional novels in the series
which profess to paint contemporary manners and the scenes of common life;
and remembering in the 'Antiquary' the vision in the tapestried chamber,
the duel, the horrible secret, and the death of old Elspeth, the drowned
fisherman, and above all the tremendous situation of the tide-bound party
under the cliffs; and in 'St. Ronan's Well,' the long-drawn mystery, the
suspicion of insanity, and the catastrophe of suicide;--determine whether
an epithet which it would be a profanation to apply to the structure of
any, even the most exciting of Sir Walter Scott's stories, is fairly
applicable to tales which, though illimitably inferior in execution, yet
observe the same limitations of incident, and the same moral aims.