the host, apprehensive of death for having
trespassed on the respect due to his Sovereign, while incognito, is
agreeably surprised by receiving honors and rewards. In Mr. Hartshorne’s collection, there is a romance on the same
foundation, called King Edward and the Shepherd, which, considered as
illustrating manners, is still more curious than the King and the
Hermit; but it is foreign to the present purpose. The reader has here
the original legend from which the incident in the romance is derived;
and the identifying the irregular Hermit with the Friar Tuck of Robin
Hood’s story, was an obvious expedient. The name of Ivanhoe was suggested by an old rhyme. All novelists have
had occasion at some time or other to wish, as Falstaff did, that they
knew where a commodity of good names was to be had. On such an occasion
the author chanced to call to memory a rhyme recording three names of
the manors forfeited by the ancestor of the celebrated Hampden, for
striking the Black Prince a blow with his racket, when they quarreled
at tennis: "Tring, Wing, and Ivanhoe,
For striking of a blow,
Hampden did forego,
And glad he could escape so."
The word suited the author’s purpose in two material respects,—first, it had an ancient English sound; and secondly, it conveyed no
indication whatever of the nature of the story. He presumes to hold
this last quality to be of no small importance. What is called a catchy
title serves the direct interest of the bookseller or publisher, who
by this means sometimes sells an edition while it is yet passing the
press. But if the author permits an over degree of attention to be
drawn to his work before it has appeared, he places himself in the
embarrassing condition of having excited a degree of expectation which,
if he proves unable to satisfy, is a mistake fatal to his literary
reputation. Besides, when we meet such a title as the Gunpowder Plot,
or any other connected with general history, each reader, before he has
seen the book, has formed to himself some particular idea of the sort
of manner in which the story is to be conducted, and the nature of the
amusement which he is to derive from it. In this he is probably
disappointed, and in that case may be naturally disposed to visit upon
the author or the work the unpleasant feelings thus excited. In such a
case the literary adventurer is censured, not for having missed the
mark at which he himself aimed, but for not having shot off his shaft
in a direction he never thought of. On the footing of unreserved communication which the Author has
established with the reader, he may here add the trifling circumstance
that a roll of Norman warriors occurring in 

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