Tales from Scott. By Sir Edward Sullivan, Bart. With an
Introduction by Edward Dowden, LL.D. (Elliot Stock.)— About thirteen years ago, Miss Braddon undertook to abridge the Waverley Novels, and to serve them up to the public in penny numbers, each novel being reproduced, after a fashion, in thirty-two pages. There never was a more egregious literary blunder. All the inimitable charms of Scott's wonderful romances were ruthlessly extracted, and not a sparkle was left of the vitality which throbs in almost every page of his forty-eight volumes. Sir Edward Sullivan does not maltreat Sir Walter to the same extent as Miss Braddon, for that lady introduced expressions of which Scott would have been ashamed; but while he has accurately
related the plots of nine romances, he has in our judgment crushed the life out of them and left nothing but dry bones. This result was indeed inevitable, and we are not surprised that a fine critic like Professor Dowden should award his praise to the volume in carefully guarded language. Life is short, he says, and leisure is shorter than life, and while he cannot say how he should feel towards these renderings if he were ignorant of their original, they serve to marshall his recollections, and revive within himself " the sensation of eight happy seasons of the past." The volume, as we have said, contains nine tales, but " The Black Dwarf," which, he justly says, is of " decidedly inferior quality," is evidently not included in his memories of the past. And surely the Professor is inaccurate in saying that that tale was ranked high by its author. Lockhart does not justify the statement.
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