the 'huddling up' of the end, appears in it for the first,
though unluckily by no means for the last, time. But it would have been
a very sad thing for the public taste if it had definitely refused _The
Antiquary_. A book which contains within the compass of the opening
chapters such masterpieces as the journey to the Hawes, the description
of the Antiquary's study, and the storm and rescue, must have had a
generation of idiots for an audience if it had not been successful.
Moreover, it had, as Scott's unwearied biographer has already noted, a
new and special source of interest in the admirable fragmentary mottoes,
invented to save the greater labour of discovery, which adorn its
chapter-headings.[22] Lockhart himself thought that Scott never quite
equalled these first three novels. I cannot agree with him there; but
what is certain is that he in them discovered, with extraordinary
felicity, skill in three different kinds of novel--the historical, the
romantic-adventurous, and that of ordinary or almost wholly ordinary
life; and that even he never exactly added a fourth kind to his
inventions, though he varied them wonderfully within themselves. The
romance partly historical, the romance mainly or wholly fictitious, and
the novel of manners; these were his three classes, and hardly any
others.

It is not entirely explained what were the reasons which determined
Scott to make his next venture, the _Tales of my Landlord_, under a
fresh pseudonym, and also to publish it not with Constable, but with
Murray and Blackwood. Lockhart's blame of John Ballantyne may not be
unfair; but it is rather less supported by documentary evidence than
most of his strictures on the Ballantynes. And the thing is perhaps to
be sufficiently accounted for by Scott's double dislike, both as an
independent person and a man of business, of giving a monopoly of his
work to one publisher, and by his constant fancy for trying experiments
on the public--a fancy itself not wholly, though partially,
comprehensible. As a matter of fact, _Old Mortality_ and the _Black
Dwarf_ were offered to and pretty eagerly accepted by Murray and
Blackwood, on the terms of half profits and the inevitable batch of 'old
stock.' The story of the unlucky quarrel with Blackwood in consequence
of some critical remarks of his on the end of the _Black
Dwarf_,--remarks certainly not inexcusable,--and of Scott's famous
letter in reply, will doubtless receive further elucidation in