They take so much pleasure in bombast, and write in such a high-flown, bloated, affected, hyperbolical and acrobatic style that their prototype is Ancient Pistol, whom his friend Falstaff once impatiently told to say what he had to say like a man of this world.

[Illustration] The prototype of Jeanie Deans was Helen Walker, to whose memory Sir W. Scott erected a tombstone in Irongray churchyard (Kirkcudbright).