Godwin. Mrs.
Shelley presently wrote thanking him for the review, and assuring him
that it was her own work. Scott had apparently taken Sheller's disclaimer
as an innocent evasion; it was an age of literary superscheries.
--Abbotsford Manuscripts.]
As a critic, of course, he was mistaken; but his was the generous error
of the heart, and it is the heart in Walter Scott, even more than the
brain, that lends its own vitality to his creations. Equipped as he was
with a taste truly catholic, capable in old age of admiring "Pelham," he
had the power to do what he calls "the big bow-wow strain;" yet he was
not, as in his modesty he supposed, denied "the exquisite torch which
renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting, from the
truth of the description and the sentiment."
The letter of Rose Bradwardine to Waverley is alone enough to disprove
Scott's disparagement of himself, his belief that he had been denied
exquisiteness of touch. Nothing human is more delicate, nothing should be
more delicately handled, than the first love of a girl. What the
"analytical" modern novelist would pass over and dissect and place
beneath his microscope till a student of any manliness blushes with shame
and annoyance, Scott suffers Rose Bradwardine to reveal with a sensitive
shyness.
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