Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 21, 1896 - Miscellanies, Volume IV

RANDOM MEMORIES
the little schoolboy of nine or ten with their un-
reality ; I read no more, or I did not grasp what I
was reading ; and years elapsed before I consciously
met Diana and her father among the hills, or saw
Rashleigh dying in the chair. When I think of
that novel and that evening, I am impatient with all
others ; they seem but shadows and impostors ; they
cannot satisfy the appetite which this awakened ;
and I dare be known to think it the best of Sir
Walter's by nearly as much as Sir Walter is the best
of novelists. Perhaps Mr. Lang is right, and our
first friends in the land of fiction are always the
most real. And yet I had read before this Guy
Mannering, and some of Waverley, with no such
delighted sense of truth and humour, and I read
immediately after the greater part of the Waverley
Novels, and was never moved again in the same way
or to the same degree. One circumstance is sus-
picious : my critical estimate of the Waverley Novels
has scarce changed at all since I was ten. Rob Roy,
Guy Mannering, and Redgauntlet first ; then, a
little lower, The Fortunes of Nigel; then, after a
huge gulf, Ivanhoe and Anne of Geier stein : the rest
nowhere ; such was the verdict of the boy. Since
then The Antiquary, St Ronans Well, Kenilworth,
and The Heart of Midlothian have gone up in the
scale ; perhaps Ivanhoe and Anne of Geier stein have
gone a trifle down ; Diana Vernon has been added
to my admirations in that enchanted world of Rob
Roy ; I think more of the letters in Redgauntlet,
and Peter Peebles, that dreadful piece of realism, I
3ii