nd
continued sale of his works, as a sufficient commendation of them."[398]
In the case of Byron, as always when the public approved the works of
one of his brother authors, he considered the popular judgment right.

Scott did not altogether stop writing poetry, however, as is sometimes
supposed. _The Field of Waterloo_ and _Harold the Dauntless_ were both
written after this time; and the mottoes and lyrics in the novels
compose a delightful body of verse. The fact seems to be that he lost
zest for writing long poems, partly because of the favor with which
Byron's poems were received, and his own consequent feeling of
inferiority in poetic composition; partly because of his discovery of
the greater ease with which he could write prose, and the greater scope
it gave him. The more ambitious attempts among the poems which he wrote
after 1814 are comparative failures. But the poetry in his nature
prevented him from entirely giving over the composition of verse, and he
found real delight in the occasional writing of short pieces that
required no continued effort. They were usually made to be used in the
novels, for after the publication of _Guy Mannering_ novel-writing
became specifically Scott's occupation.[399]

The price of his success in any direction was that he was unable to keep
his field to himself. Having set a fashion, he was more than once
annoyed by the crowd who wrote in his style and made him feel the
necessity of striking out a new line.[400] It was comparatively easy for
the vigorous man who wrote _Waverley_, but in the end, when through his
losses he was more than ever obliged to hit the popular taste, to feel
that he must find a new style seemed a hard fate. Yet he meant to be
beforehand in the race. This is the record in his _Journal_: "Hard
pressed as I am by these imitators, who must put the thing out of
fashion at last, I consider, like a fox at his last shifts, whether
there be a way to dodge them--some new device to throw them off, and
have a mile or two of free ground while I have legs and wind left to use
it. There is one way to give novelty: to depend for success on the
interest of a well-contrived story. But woe's me! that requires thought,
consideration--the writing out a regular plan or plot--above all, the
adhering to one--which I never can do, for the ideas rise as I write,
and bear such a disproportioned extent to that which each occupied at
the first concoction, that (cocksnowns!) I shall n