s that his style, never distinguished, and often lax, has not
impaired the vitality of his prose. The heart which beats in his works,
the knowledge of human nature, the dramatic vigour of his character, the
nobility of his whole being win the day against the looseness of his
manner, the negligence of his composition, against the haste of fatigue
which set him, as Lady Louisa Stuart often told him, on "huddling up a
conclusion anyhow, and so kicking the book out of his way." In this
matter of denouements he certainly was no more careful than Shakspeare or
Moliere.

The permanence of Sir Walter's romances is proved, as we said, by their
survival among all the changes of fashion in the art of fiction. When he
took up his pen to begin "Waverley," fiction had not absorbed, as it does
to-day, almost all the best imaginative energy of English or foreign
writers. Now we hear of "art" on every side, and every novelist must give
the world his opinion about schools and methods. Scott, on the other
hand, lived in the greatest poetical ago since that of Elizabeth. Poetry
or the drama (in which, to be sure, few succeeded) occupied Wordsworth,
Byron, Coleridge, Shelley, Crabbe, Campbell, and Keats. Then, as Joanna
Baillie hyperbolically declared, "The Scotch novels put poetry out of
fashion."

[Abbotsford Manuscripts. Hogg averred that nobody either read or wrote
poetry after Sir Walter took to prose.]

Till they appeared, novels seem to have been left to readers like the
plaintive lady's-maid whom Scott met at Dalkeith, when he beheld "the
fair one descend from the carriage with three half-bound volumes of a
novel in her hand." Mr. Morritt, writing to Scott in March, 1815, hopes
he will "restore pure narrative to the dignity from which it gradually
slipped before it dwindled into a manufactory for the circulating
library." "Waverley," he asserted, "would prevail over people otherwise
averse to blue-backed volumes." Thus it was an unconsidered art which
Scott took up and revived. Half a century had passed since Fielding gave
us in "Tom Jones" his own and very different picture of life in the
"'forty-five,"--of life with all the romance of the "Race to Derby" cut
down to a sentence or two. Since the age of the great English novelists,
Richardson and Fielding and Miss Burney, the art of fiction had been
spasmodically alive in the hands of Mrs. Radcliffe, had been sentimental
with Henry Mackenzie, and now was all but moribund, save for