dogged determination anything that even he had hitherto done. The novel
was, of course, to him comparative child's play: he had written novels
before in six weeks or thereabouts all told, though his impaired vigour,
the depression of his spirits, and the sense of labouring for the mere
purpose of pouring the results into a sieve, made things harder now. But
the _Napoleon_, though he had made some preparation for this kind of
writing by his elaborate and multifarious editorial work, especially by
that on Dryden and Swift, was to a great extent new; and it required,
what was always irksome to him, elaborate reading up of books and
documents for the special purpose. No man has ever utilised the results
of previous reading for his own pleasure better than Scott, and few men,
not mere professed book-grubbers, have ever had vaster stores of it. But
he frequently confesses--a confession which in many ways makes his
plight in these years still more to be pitied--an ingrained dislike to
task-work of any kind; and there is no more laborious task-work than
getting up and piecing together the materials for history.

The book, one, at a rough guess, of at least a million words, was
completed from end to end in less than eighteen months, during which he
also wrote _Woodstock_, _Malachi Malagrowther_ (_vide infra_), with
several reviews and minor things, besides serving his usual number of
days at the Clerk's table, devoting necessarily much time to the not
more painful than troublesome business of his pecuniary affairs, his
removal from Castle Street, etc., and taking one journey of some length
in the summer of 1826 to London and Paris for materials. The feat was
accomplished by a rigid system of 'so much per day'--by dint of which,
no doubt, an amount of work, surprising to the inexperienced, can be
turned out with no necessarily disastrous consequences. But Scott,
disgusted with society, and avoiding it from motives of economy as well
as of want of heart, disturbed hardly at all by strangers at Abbotsford,
and not at all in the lodgings and furnished houses which he took while
in Edinburgh, let 'his own thought drive him like a goad' to work in the
interest of his task-masters, and perhaps, also, for the sake of
drowning care, pushed the system to the most extravagant lengths. We
know that he sometimes worked from six in the morning to six at even,
with breakfast and luncheon brought into his study and consumed there;
and though his