The Sun.
London, England, 1855-08-27 00:00:00

notice of the discovery appeared in The Sun news-
paper in London, and singularly enough (adds M.
Cabany) the same day Mr. Lockhart died sud-
denly at Abbotsford, in Scotland." In this manner
we find ourselves unexpectedly called into court
as a witness in the case, capable of proving,
by the evidence derivable from a file of our
journal, that at least so far one argument of
a suspicious character among those brought for-
ward against the proprietor and editor of " More-
duu" is altogether and most positively inadmissible.
As we have already remarked, M. Cabany himself
appears to us to be firmly impressed with a belief in,
the authenticity of the work in question as a verit-
able production of Sir Walter Scott. The author-
ship, of course, remains to this moment entirely a
matter of opinion. It is the opinion of M. Cabany
that " Moredun "is a work of Scott's. It ie ours
—most decidedly—that it is not. We believe it to
be, in our conscience we believe it to be, another
ingenious contrefacon—nothing more than a can,
trefacult. Bat not, as the majority of our con-
temporaries appear to have insisted, we cannot but
think somewhat unfairly, a forgery to the last de-
gree contemptible and ridiculous. On the contrary,
it appears to us, here and there, to be so ingenious
of its kind as to be entitled iu some measure to a
sort of spurious admiration. " Vortigern " was,
if you please, contemptible enough, but " More-
dun " is at least so far as any such imitation can
be, in one sense of the word, respectable. Could
we by possibility suppose it for one instant to be a
veritable offspring of the great Scotch novelist's
imagination, we must perforce regard it as one of
singularly inferior pretensions. If " Moredun "
can be said to resemble in any respect a his-
torical-romance by Sir Walter Scott, it can
only be after the somewhat indefinite manner
in which a rough drawing in distemper, touched
here and there with lather,. ink, can be sup-
posed to bear any likeness whatever to some
gorgeously-colonic:1 masterpiece from the hand
of a Rubens or a Tintoretto. Nevertheless, we
are well acquainted, through the examples pre-
sented to view by every literature that the loftiest
genius is occasionally liable to periods of hallucina-
tion. Have we forgotten that Sir Walter himself
wrote "St. Ronan's Well ?" Do we not remember
that Lord Byron penned " The Deformed Trans-
formed ?" Cannot we call to mind how Bulwer
once upon a time presented to the world " The
Siamese Twins," and Dickens " Bleak House,"and
Thackeray book after book like " Rebecca and
Rowena," and the abominable " Kickleburys ?"
Wherefore, the insignificance of the work under
notice as compared with the succession of inimit-
able masterpieces making up the aggregate of the
Waverley Novels, could not reasonably be regarded
as affording us, of itself, conclusive testimony
of the spuriousness of " Moredun." That testimony
we conceive to be so manifold as to require in no
way to be here deliberately particularised. It
abounds in every page of the production, and of
such pages there are not less than 755 altogether.
Mystically enough the motto chosen for his narra-
tive by W. S. has been selected by him from " Les
Plaideurs," running to this effect somewhat in-
coherently, " Je finis ! Ah ! Avant la naissance du
monde . . . Passons au deluge !" Quaintly
chosen, too, is the sentence from Bayes prefixed to
the second volume—" If I am to write familiar
things as sonnets to Armida, and the like, I make
use of stewed prunes only ; but when I have a
grand design in hand, I even take physic and let
blood." Wherefore we are left to presume, of
course, that W. S., before sitting down to the com-
position of this wonderful historico-romantic galli-
maufry of " Moredun," consented to be phleboto-
naised to an extent gratifying to the heart of a
Sangrado. Quoting Cumberland on the title-page
of volume three, our novelist is heard explaining
apologetically, " Well, Mr. Belconr, it is a rough
sample you have had of my countrymen's spirit ;
but I trust you will not think the worse of
them for it." A rough sample, beginning
with the sudden breaking up of the frost
at Scone, and ending with the melodramatic spec-
tacle presented to view in the moot-hall in the an-
cient city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Sometimes
the incidents recounted are those of contrabandist
adventure—sometimes of knightly tournay—somes
times of necromantic mysteriousness : occasionally
of storm and conflagration—once of shipwreck—
and repeatedly of bloodshed, now by open contest,
and now again by dastardly assassination. Both
the English King John, and the Northern monarch,
William the Lion of Scotland, appear upon the
scene rather frequently. Moredun, the sou of the
Crusading Richard, is, of course, the hero of the
romance—the heroine being the fair Lady of Scone,
the Lady Isabella of Huntingdon. Besides the
two sovereigns already mentioned, another crowned
potentate brings the attraction of his strange history
to the plot in the person of a supposed Smuggler
Captain, known throughout only by the name of
Maelstrom, but who proves in the closing scene of
the story to be no less august a personage than Isaac,
King of Cyprus. Wonderfully conspicuous, however,
among the grander forms depicted, are those three
Caledonian youths, as like as peas, esquires in po-
sition though knight-errants in conduct, Maleolne
Beg, Tam Macduff, and Adam Peebles. These three
callants are to the story of " Moredun " all-essen-
tial arid übiquitous, everywhere and everything,
We follow their footsteps, wondering and curious
as to what may happen now in the cavernous ruin.,
of Marsden. Rocks, now in the garrets of the an-
cient hostelry of the Crown and Anchor, now iu
the green depths of the sylvan Sherwood, and so
on, through adventure after adventure. It is the
one merit of the tale that it abounds in stirring in-
cidents, in hair-breadth 'scapes, in breathless catas-
trophes, in situations of a kind as unexpected as
they are extraordinary. But from first to last the
whole fiction is a clever make-believe—a specious
affectation in style and manner such as can deceive
few besides the gifted critic, who has for once al-
lowed himself to become the dupe of some invisible
and ingenious literary ventriloquist.