endency--which grew on him and may no doubt have been encouraged by the
astonishing pecuniary rewards of his work--to hurry his conclusions, to
"huddle up the cards and throw them into the bag," as Lady Louisa Stuart
told him. There is one of the numerous, but it would seem generic and
classifiable, forms of unpleasant dream in which the dreamer's watch, to
his consternation, suddenly begins to send its hands round at double and
ten-fold speed. Scott is rather apt to do this, towards the close of his
novels, in his eagerness to begin something else. These defects,
however, are defects much more from the point of view of abstract
criticism than from that of the pleasure of the reader: while, even from
the former, they are outweighed many times by merits. And as regards our
present method of estimation, they hardly count at all.

For, in that calculus, the important thing is that Scott, like Miss
Austen, at once opened an immense new field to the novelist, and showed
how that field was to be cultivated. The complement-contrast of the pair
can need emphasising only to those on whom no emphasis would be likely
to impress it: but it may not be quite so evident at once that between
them they cover almost the entire possible ground of prose fiction. The
more striking and popular as well as more strictly novel style of Scott
naturally attracted most attention at first: indeed it can hardly be
said that, for the next thirty years, much attempt was made to follow in
Miss Austen's steps, while such attempts as were made were seldom very
good.[19] But there is no need to hurry Time: and he generally knows
what he is about. At any rate he had, in and through these two
provided--for generations, probably for centuries, to come--patterns and
principles for whoso would to follow in prose fiction.

[19] Some work of distinction, actually later than hers in date,
is older in kind. This is the case not only with the later books
of her Irish elder sister. Miss Edgeworth (see last chapter),
but with all those of her Scotch younger one, Miss Ferrier, who
wrote _Marriage_ just after _Sense and Sensibility_ appeared,
but did not publish it (1818) till after Miss Austen's death,
following it with _The Inheritance_ (1824) and _Destiny_ (1831).
Miss Ferrier, who had a strong though rather hard humour and
great faculty of pronounced character-drawing, is better at a
series of sketches than at a complete nove