Crossword-Solution: BALLANTRAE 10 letters, 1 clue 🏆 scrabble score: 12

What are the indescribable effects that romance, casting far beyond problems of character and conduct, seeks to realise? What is the nature of the great informing, underlying idea that animates a truly great romance--_The Bride of Lammermoor_, _Monte Cristo_, _Les Miserables_, _The Scarlet Letter_, _The Master of Ballantrae_? These questions can only be answered by de-forming the impression given by each of these works to present it in the chop-logic language of philosophy.

Some of these are directly pictorial: the fight in the round-house on board the brig _Covenant_; the duel between the two brothers of Ballantrae in the island of light thrown up by the candles from that abyss of windless night; the flight of the Princess Seraphina through the dark mazes of the wood,--all these, although they carry with them subtleties beyond the painter's art, yet have something of picture in them.

Henry, in _The Master of Ballantrae_, is a charming veiled figure, drawn in the shadow; Miss Barbara Grant and Catriona in the continuation of _Kidnapped_ are real enough to have made many suitors for their respective hands among male readers of the book;--but that is nothing, reply the critics of the other party: a walking doll will find suitors.

That day, when I should have been at my work, she came upon me in the kitchen, ‘The Master of Ballantrae’ beside me, but I was not reading: my head lay heavy on the table, and to her anxious eyes, I doubt not, I was the picture of woe.

For weeks too, if not for months, she adhered to her determination not to read him, though I, having come to my senses and seen that there is a place for the ‘prentice, was taking a pleasure, almost malicious, in putting ‘The Master of Ballantrae’ in her way.