if not with
minute accuracy, very widely indeed: and he possessed, as Lord Morley
has well said, "the genius of history" in a degree which perhaps no
merely meticulous scholar has ever reached, and which was not exceeded
in _quality_ even by the greatest historians such as Gibbon. He had an
almost unmatched combination of common sense with poetic imagination, of
knowledge of the world with knowledge of letters. He had shown himself
to be possessed of the secret of semi-historical narrative itself in
half a dozen remarkable verse romances, and therefore had less to do in
engineering the prose romance. Last of all, he had seen what to
avoid--not merely in his editing of Strutt's _Queenhoo Hall_ (a valuable
property-room for the novel, but nothing of a real novel), but in his
reading of the failures of his predecessors and contemporaries. The very
beginning of _Waverley_ itself (which most people skip) is invaluable,
because it shows us that at the time he wrote it (which, it need hardly
be said, was a long time before its completion) he had not the knowledge
or the courage to strike straight out into the stream of action and
conversation, but troubled himself with accumulating bladders and
arranging ropes for the possible salvation of his narrative if it got
into difficulties. Very soon he knew that it would not get into
difficulties: and away he went.

It ought not to be necessary, but from some symptoms it may be
desirable, to point out that Scott is very far from being an historical
novelist only. An acute French critic, well acquainted with both
literatures, once went so far as to say that there were a good many
professed "philosophical" novels which did not contain such keen
psychology as Scott's: and I would undertake to show a good deal of
cause on this side. But short of it, it is undeniable that he can do
perfectly well without any historical scaffolding. There is practically
nothing of it in his second and third novels, _Guy Mannering_ and _The
Antiquary_, each of which good judges have sometimes ranked as his very
best: there is as little or less in _St. Ronan's Well_, a very fine
thing as it is, and one which, but for James Ballantyne's meddling folly
and prudery, would have been much finer. The incomparable little
conversation--scenes and character-sketches scattered among the
Introductions to the novels--especially the history of Crystal
Croftangry--show that he could perfectly well have dispensed with all