favour of that which is foreign, but that it rested partly upon
improbabilities, arising out of the circumstances in which the
English reader is placed. If you describe to him a set of wild
manners, and a state of primitive society existing in the
Highlands of Scotland, he is much disposed to acquiesce in the
truth of what is asserted. And reason good. If he be of the
ordinary class of readers, he has either never seen those remote
districts at all, or he has wandered through those desolate
regions in the course of a summer tour, eating bad dinners,
sleeping on truckle beds, stalking from desolation to desolation,
and fully prepared to believe the strangest things that could be
told him of a people, wild and extravagant enough to be attached
to scenery so extraordinary. But the same worthy person, when
placed in his own snug parlour, and surrounded by all the
comforts of an Englishman's fireside, is not half so much
disposed to believe that his own ancestors led a very different
life from himself; that the shattered tower, which now forms a
vista from his window, once held a baron who would have hung him
up at his own door without any form of trial; that the hinds, by
whom his little pet-farm is managed, a few centuries ago would
have been his slaves; and that the complete influence of feudal
tyranny once extended over the neighbouring village, where the
attorney is now a man of more importance than the lord of the
manor.

While I own the force of these objections, I must confess, at the
same time, that they do not appear to me to be altogether
insurmountable. The scantiness of materials is indeed a
formidable difficulty; but no one knows better than Dr Dryasdust,
that to those deeply read in antiquity, hints concerning the