"The humorous and happy adaptation of legal terns shows no moderate
acquaintance with the arcana of the law, and a perpetual allusion to the
English and Latin classics no common share of scholarship and taste."
The "Scots Magazine" illustrated the admirable unanimity of reviewers
when they are unanimous. The "Anti-Jacobin" objected that no
Chateau-Margaux sent in the wood from Bordeaux to Dundee in 1713 could
have been drinkable in 1741. "Claret two-and-thirty years old! It almost
gives us the gripes to think of it." Indeed, Sir Walter, as Lochhart
assures us, was so far from being a judge of claret that he could not
tell when it was "corked." One or two points equally important amused the
reviewer, who, like most of his class, detected the hand of Scott. There
was hardly a possibility, as Mr. Morritt told Sir Walter, "that the poems
in "Waverley" could fail to suggest their author. No man who ever heard
you tell a story over a table but must recognize you at once." To his
praise of "Waverley" Mr. Morritt hardly added any adverse criticism,
beyond doubting the merit of the early chapters, and denouncing the word
"sombre" as one which had lately "kept bad company among the slipshod
English of the sentimental school.
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