and frivolous an affair as a tournament? It is
the privilege of great masters to make things
so, and it is a churlish thing to gainsay it. 
Was it not Wendell Holmes who described
the prosaic man, who enters a drawing-room
with a couple of facts, like ill-conditioned bull-dogs
at his heels, ready to let them loose on
any play of fancy? The great writer can never
go wrong. If Shakespeare gives a sea-coast to
Bohemia, or if Victor Hugo calls an English
prize-fighter Mr. Jim-John-Jack---well, it was
so, and that's an end of it. ``There is no second
line of rails at that point,'' said an editor to a
minor author. ``I make a second line,'' said
the author; and he was within his rights,
if he can carry his readers' conviction with
him.

  But this is a digression from ``Ivanhoe.''
What a book it is! The second greatest historical
novel in our language, I think. Every
successive reading has deepened my admiration
for it. Scott's soldiers are always as good as
his women (with exceptions) are weak; but
here, while the soldiers are at their very best,
the romantic figure of Rebecca redeems the
female side of the story from the usual commonplace
routine. Scott drew manly men because
he was a manly man himself, and found
the task a sympathetic one.

  He drew young heroines because a convention
demanded it, which he had never the
hardihood to break. It is only when we get
him for a dozen chapters on end with a minimum
of petticoat---in the long stretch, for example,
from the beginning of the Tournament
to the end of the Friar Tuck incident---that we
realize the height of continued romantic narrative
to which he could attain. I don't think in
the whole range of our literature we have a finer
sustained flight than that.

  There is, I admit, an intolerable amount of
redundant verbiage in Scott's novels. Those
endless and unnecessary introductions make the
shell very thick before you come to the oyster. 
They are often admirable in themselves, learned,
witty, picturesque, but with no relation or proportion
to the story which they are supposed
to introduce. Like so much of our English
fiction, they are very good matter in a very
bad place. Digression and want of method
and order are traditional national sins. Fancy
introducing an essay on how to live on nothing
a year as Thackeray did in ``Vanity Fair,'' or
sandwiching in a ghost story as Dickens has
dared to do. As well might a dramatic author
rush up to the footlights and begin telling anecdotes
while his play was suspending its action
and his characters waiting wearily behind him. 
It is all wrong, though every great name can
be quoted in support of it. Our sense of form
is lamentably lacking, and Sir Walter sinned
with the rest. But get past all that to a crisis
in the real story, and who finds the terse phrase,
the short fire-word, so surely as he? Do you
remember when the reckless Sergeant of Dragoons
stands at last before the grim Puritan,
upon whose head a price has been set: ``A
thousand marks or a bed of heather!'' says he,
as he draws. The Puritan draws also: ``The
Sword of the Lord and of Gideon!'' says he. 
No verbiage there! But the very spirit of
either man and of either party, in the few stern
words, which haunt your mind. ``Bows and
Bills!'' cry the Saxon Varangians, as the Moslem
horse charges home. You feel it is just
what they must have cried. Even more terse
and businesslike was the actual battle-cry of the
fathers of the same men on that long-drawn day
when they fought under the ``Red Dragon of
Wessex'' on the low ridge at Hastings. ``Out!
Out!'' they roared, as the Norman chivalry
broke upon them. Terse, strong, prosaic---
the very genius of the race was in the cry.

  Is it that the higher emotions are not there?
Or is it that they are damped down and covered
over as too precious to be exhibited? Something
of each, perhaps. I once met the widow
of the man who, as a young signal midshipman,
had taken Nelson's famous message from the
Signal Yeoman and communicated it to the
ship's company. The officers were impressed. 
The men were not. ``Duty!'' they muttered. 
``We've always done it. Why not?'' Anything
in the least highfalutin' would depress,
not exalt, a British company. It is the under
statement which delights them. German troops