But, alas! what could my readers
have expected from the chivalrous epithets of Howard, Mordaunt,
Mortimer, or Stanley, or from the softer and more sentimental sounds of
Belmour, Belville, Belfield, and Belgrave, but pages of inanity, similar
to those which have been so christened for half a century past? I
must modestly admit I am too diffident of my own merit to place it in
unnecessary opposition to preconceived associations; I have, therefore,
like a maiden knight with his white shield, assumed for my hero,
WAVERLEY, an uncontaminated name, bearing with its sound little of good
or evil, excepting what the reader shall hereafter be pleased to affix
to it. But my second or supplemental title was a matter of much more
difficult election, since that, short as it is, may be held as pledging
the author to some special mode of laying his scene, drawing his
characters, and managing his adventures. Had I, for example, announced
in my frontispiece, 'Waverley, a Tale of other Days,' must not every
novel reader have anticipated a castle scarce less than that of Udolpho,
of which the eastern wing had long been uninhabited, and the keys either
lost, or consigned to the care of some aged butler or housekeeper, whose
trembling steps, about the middle of the second volume, were doomed to
guide the hero, or heroine, to the ruinous precincts? Would not the owl
have shrieked and the cricket cried in my very title-page? and could
it have been possible for me, with a moderate attention to decorum, to
introduce any scene more lively than might be produced by the jocularity
of a clownish but faithful valet, or the garrulous narrative of the
heroine's fille-de-chambre, when rehearsing the stories of blood and
horror which she had heard in the servants' hall? Again, had my title
borne 'Waverley, a Romance from the German,' what head so obtuse as
not to image forth a profligate abbot, an oppressive duke, a secret and
mysterious association of Rosycrucians and Illuminati, with all their
properties of black cowls, caverns, daggers, electrical machines,
trap-doors, and dark-lanterns? Or if I had rather chosen to call my work
a 'Sentimental Tale,' would it not have been a sufficient presage of a
heroine with a profusion of auburn hair, and a harp, the soft solace
of her solitary hours, which she fortunately finds always the means of
transporting from castle to cottage, although she herself be sometimes
obliged to jump out of a two-pair-of-stairs window, and is more than
once bewildered on her journey, alone and on foot, without any guide but
a blowzy peasant girl, whose jargon she hardly can understand? Or again,
if my WAVERLEY had been entitled 'A Tale of the Times,' wouldst thou
not, gentle reader, have demanded from me a dashing sketch of the
fashionable world, a few anecdotes of private scandal thinly veiled,
and if lusciously painted, so much the better? a heroine from Grosvenor
Square, and a hero from the Barouche Club or the Four-in-hand, with a
set of subordinate characters from the elegantes of Queen Anne Street
East, or the dashing heroes of the Bow Street Office? I could proceed in
proving the importance of a title-page, and displaying at the same time
my own intimate knowledge of the particular ingredients necessary to the
composition of romances and novels of various descriptions: but it
is enough, and I scorn to tyrannize longer over the impatience of my
reader, who is doubtless already anxious to know the choice made by an
author so profoundly versed in the different branches of his art.
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