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.

But Scott, of course, had even less in common with the peeper and botanizer on maidens' hearts than with the wildest romanticist.

He considered that "a want of story is always fatal to a book the first reading, and it is well if it gets a chance of a second." From him "Pride and Prejudice" got a chance of three readings at least.