The charge so frequently laid against the great master who wrote Waverley, that he often abused the patience of his readers in devoting too many pages to place-description, seems to me unfounded, and I hold that in judging of the correctness of such stricture, one must simply ask oneself the question: Was this description necessary to the right understanding of the impression the author wished to communicate to you? If so, then he should not be blamed for expecting you to take the trouble of reading what he has taken the trouble to write. If not, then one may throw the book away. For the author who is empty-headed enough to give, without necessity, topography for ideas, is rarely worth the trouble of reading, even where at last his description of places ends. But one must not forget that often the opinion of the reader as regards the necessity or otherwise of a digression is false, because before the catastrophe he cannot know what is or is not requisite for a gradual unfolding of the circumstances. And if after the catastrophe he takes up the book again—I am not speaking of books that one only reads once—and even then still holds that this or that digression could have been spared without detriment to the impression of the whole, it still always remains the question whether he would have received entirely that same impression if the author had not led him to it in a more or less artistic manner, exactly by those digressions which to the superficially judging reader appear superfluous.
Do you think that Amy Robsart’s death would have moved you so much if you had been a stranger in Kenilworth halls? and can you believe that there is no connection—the connection of contrast—between the rich attire in which the unworthy Leicester showed himself to her, and the blackness of his soul? Do you not feel that Leicester—everyone knows this who knows the man from other sources than the novel alone—stood infinitely lower than he is depicted in Kenilworth? But the great novelist, who would rather fascinate by artistic arrangement of shading than by coarseness of colours, judged it beneath him to steep his brush in all the mud and blood that clung to the unworthy favourite of Elizabeth. He
