to me. I never
learned grammar. . . . I believe the bailiff in 'The Goodnatured Man' is
not far wrong when he says: 'One man has one way of expressing himself,
and another another; and that is all the difference between them.'" The
difference between Scott and Thackeray or Flaubert among good writers,
and a crowd of self-conscious and mannered "stylists" among writers not
so very good, is essential. About Shakspeare it was said that he "never
blotted a line." The observation is almost literally true about Sir
Walter. The pages of his manuscript novels show scarcely a retouch or an
erasure, whether in the "Waverley" fragment of 1805 or the unpublished
"Siege of Malta" of 1832.

[A history of Scott's Manuscripts, with good fac-similes, will be found
in the Catalogue of the Scott Exhibition, Edinburgh, 1872.]

The handwriting becomes closer and smaller; from thirty-eight lines to
the page in "Waverley," he advances to between fifty and sixty in
"Ivanhoe." The few alterations are usually additions. For example, a
fresh pedantry of the Baron of Bradwardine's is occasionally set down on
the opposite page. Nothing can be less like the method of Flaubert or the
method of Mr. Ruskin, who tells us that "a sentence of 'Modern Painters'
was often written four or five tunes over in my own hand, and tried in
every word for perhaps an hour,--perhaps a forenoon,--before it was
passed for the printer." Each writer has his method; Scott was no
stipples or niggler, but, as we shall see later, he often altered much in
his proof-sheets.

[While speaking of correction, it may be noted that Scott, in his
"Advertisement" prefixed to the issue of 1829, speaks of changes made in
that collected edition. In "Waverley" these emendations are very rare,
and are unimportant. A few callidae juncturae are added, a very few lines
are deleted. The postscript of the first edition did not contain the
anecdote about the hiding-place of the manuscript among the fishing
tackle. The first line of Flora Macdonald's battle-song (chapter xxii.)
originally ran, "Mist darkens the mountain, night darkens the vale," in
place of "There is mist on the mountain and mist on the vale." For the
rest, as Scott says, "where the tree falls it must lie."]

As long as he was understood, he was almost reckless of well-constructed
sentences, of the one best word for his meaning, of rounded periods. This
indifference is not to be praised, but it is only a proof of his
greatnes