Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
We of the Anglo-Saxon race have a glorious heritage in the Waverley Novels. Sometimes, we are told that Sir Walter Scott is becoming a memory, and that of the past generation; but many feel, and I am of that number, that the author of "Ivanhoe," "Kenilworth," "Quentin Durward" and the score of other yarns which have charmed youth and age for now well-nigh a century has a permanent place in our literature, perhaps only surpassed by William Shakespeare. Lucky is the boy or girl who has grown up, and the older persons who still sojourn with the Knights and Ladies, the Kings and Queens, the Highland Fairies, the human serfs who march in an endless, enduring procession through the pages of the Prince of story tellers. For such readers the Past is hallowed with a magic circle that defies tawdriness. How pleasant it is for one who lives in a roaring city to be able by reaching to the book-shelf to forget the affairs of the day and to live in the pomp and pageantry, the heroics and devotions of the Past. The lover of Romance may well say to the reader of modern realism, "Why read of slums, of offices, and city suburbs when you may ride out with Prosper l’Gai in Hewlett’s ’Forest Lovers’ or be partner in countless intrigues of love and swordsmanship through a dozen of Alexander Dumas’ yarns’?" Why indeed?—we sometimes wonder.
It is a marvellous gift, that of the man who can look back into the past and make it alive and breathing for the readers of the present. It is dangerous to take Dumas and Scott for our guides to true history, as they have too often twisted the facts in order to spin a good tale, but as revealers of the atmosphere of history, they are unsurpassed even by the greatest historians, and if we have the atmosphere we have a rich and splendid background in which to place the facts. We may sojourn in ancient Carthage by reading Flaubert’s "Salammbo," in Rome by Sienkiewicz’s "Quo Vadis," in Pompeii by Bulwer Lytton’s "The Last Days of Pompeii," in early England by Scott’s "Ivanhoe." Even those scornful individuals who pride themselves upon being "men of the world" have something to learn if they have only studied their own time as it goes fleeting past. For facts let us turn to the scientific historians, but for life to the historic romances.