 on the other hand, without supposing him less of a conjuror
than the Northern Warlock, can, you observed, only have the liberty of selecting
his subject amidst the dust of antiquity, where nothing was to be found but dry,
sapless, mouldering, and disjointed bones, such as those which filled the valley
of Jehoshaphat. You expressed, besides, your apprehension that the unpatriotic
prejudices of my countrymen would not allow fair play to such a work as that of
which I endeavoured to demonstrate the probable success. And this, you said, was
not entirely owing to the more general prejudice in favour of that which is
foreign, but that it rested partly upon improbabilities, arising out of the
circumstances in which the English reader is placed. If you describe to him a
set of wild manners, and a state of primitive society existing in the Highlands
of Scotland, he is much disposed to acquiesce in the truth of what is asserted.
And reason good. If he be of the ordinary class of readers, he has either never
seen those remote districts at all, or he has wandered through those desolate
regions in the course of a summer tour, eating bad dinners, sleeping on truckle
beds, stalking from desolation to desolation, and fully prepared to believe the
strangest things that could be told him of a people, wild and extravagant enough
to be attached to scenery so extraordinary. But the same worthy person, when
placed in his own snug parlour, and surrounded, by all the comforts of an
Englishman's fireside, is not half so much disposed to believe that his own
ancestors led a very different life from himself; that the shattered tower which
now forms a vista from his window, once held a baron who would have hung him up
at his own door without any form of trial; that the hinds by whom his little
pet-farm is managed, a few centuries ago would have been his slaves; and that
the complete influence of feudal tyranny once extended over the neighbouring
village, where the attorney is now a man of more importance than the lord of the
manor.
    While I own the force of these objections, I must confess, at the same time,
that they do not appear to me to be altogether insurmountable. The scantiness of
materials is indeed a formidable difficulty; but no one knows better than Dr.
Dryasdust, that to those deeply read in antiquity, hints concerning the private
life of our ancestors lie scattered through the pages of our various historians,
bearing, indeed, a slender proportion to the other matters of which they treat,
but still, when collected together,
