The Monastery, and The Abbot. Each in 2 vols. "
Border Edition of the Waverley Novels." Edited by Andrew Lang. (Nimmo.)—In his introduction to The Monastery, Mr. Lang ob- serves that Scott could have bad no finer topic than a study of life at the outbreak of the Reformation, but in his remarks on The Abbot, he admits that the theme was not as well suited to the novelist's genius, as the later struggle between Cavaliers and Covenanters. Scott bore the comparative failure of The Monastery with the indifference of a man conscious of his power. And he amply regained his position in The Abbot, which, though not, as the editor truly says, " in the very first flight of the ` Waverley Novels,' has qualities as great as the best." Indeed, it may be questioned if Sir Walter has ever surpassed the wonderful scene in The Abbot, in which the reference to the marriage of Sebastian at Holyrood awakens the remorseful memories of the Queen. Mr. Lang has a just and flno passage upon Mary, which the want of space alone prevents us from quoting. His praise of Catherine Seyton as, after Diana Vernon, "the most winning, the merriest, and truest " of Scott's girls, is we think, deserved, and in the main there is truth in his pithy, remarks upon the Scottish Reformation :- " Except for the distinguished courage and absence of self- seeking in amiable men like Patrick Hamilton, and unamiable men like Knox, the Scottish Reformation was a ruffianly and a blundered affair. The Church had to a great extent deserved its doom, by luxury and selfishness, by appeals to the grosser super- stition of mankind, by a half-hearted attempt to answer arguments with fagots. The Reformed religion displayed equal intolerance ; as to superstition, she burned far more witches than Lindores and Beaton had burned Reformers. The Lords of the Congregation were a set of sanctimonious brigands ; the preachers had none of the open-mindedness which criticism should impart."
Tho etchings in these volumes are admirably drawn by Gordon Browne, and fulfil their purpose by illustrating the text ; but the representation of Catherine, in the first volume of The Abbot, is more like a woman of six-and-twenty than a girl of sixteen.
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