court duties made this fortunately impossible for a part
of the year, at least during a part of the week, they were not a
complete preservative. In the eighteen months he cleared for his
bloodsuckers nearly twenty thousand pounds, eight thousand for
_Woodstock_ and eleven or twelve for _Napoleon_. The trifling profits of
_Malachi_ and the reviews seem to have been permitted to go into his own
pocket. He was naturally proud of the exploit, but it may be feared that
it made the end certain.

Of the merits of the _Napoleon_ (the second edition of which, by the
way, carried its profits to eighteen thousand pounds) it is perhaps not
necessary to say very much. I should imagine that few living persons
have read it word for word through, and I confess very frankly that I
have not done so myself, though I think I have read enough to qualify me
for judging it. It is only unworthy of its author in the sense that one
feels it to have been not in the least the work that he was born to do.
It is nearly as good, save for the technical inferiority of Scott's
prose style, as the historical work of Southey, and very much better
than the historical work of Campbell and Moore. The information is
sufficient, the narrative clear, and the author can at need rise to very
fair eloquence, or at least rhetoric. But it is too long to be read, as
one reads Southey's _Nelson_, for its merits as biography, and not
technically authoritative enough to be an exhaustive work of reference
from the military, diplomatic, and political side. Above all, one cannot
read a page without remembering that there were living then in England
at least a dozen men who could have done it better,--Grote, Thirlwall,
Mitford, Arnold, Hallam, Milman, Lingard, Palgrave, Turner, Roscoe,
Carlyle, Macaulay, to mention only the most prominent, and mention them
at random, were all alive and of man's estate,--and probably scores who
could have done it nearly or quite as well; while there was not one
single man living, in England or in the world, who was capable of doing
the work which Scott, if not as capable as ever, was still capable of
doing like no one before and scarcely any one after him.

Take, for instance, _Woodstock_ itself. In a very quaint,
characteristic, agreeable, and, as criticism, worthless passage of _Wild
Wales_, Borrow has stigmatised it as 'trash.' I only wish we had more
such trash outside the forty-eight volumes of the _Waverley Novels_, or
were likely to