ay. Besides, I know, as a small farmer, that good husbandry consists in
not taking the same crop too frequently from the same soil; and as
turnips come after wheat, according to the best rules of agriculture, I
take it that an edition of Swift will do well after such a scourging crop
as 'Marmiou.'"

[March 13, 1808. Copied from the Collection of Lady Napier and Ettrick.]

These fears of the brave, then, were not unfamiliar to Scott; but he
audaciously disregarded all of them in the composition of "Guy
Mannering." He had just spun his web, like the spider of his simile, he
had just taken off his intellectual fields the "scourging crop" of "The
Lord of the Isles," he had just received the discouraging news of its
comparative failure, when he "buckled to," achieved "Guy Mannering" in
six weeks, and published it. Moliere tells us that he wrote "Les Facheux"
in a fortnight; and a French critic adds that it reads indeed as if it
had been written in, a fortnight. Perhaps a self-confident censor might
venture a similar opinion about "Guy Mannering." It assuredly shows
traces of haste; the plot wanders at its own will; and we may believe
that the Author often--did not see his own way out of the wood. But there
is little harm in that. "If I do not know what is coming next," a modern
novelist has remarked, "how can the public know?" Curiosity, at least, is
likely to be excited by this happy-go-lucky manner of Scott's. "The worst
of it is;" as he wrote to Lady Abercorn about his poems (June 9,1808),
"that I am not very good or patient in slow and careful composition; and
sometimes I remind myself of the drunken man, who could run long after he
could not walk." Scott could certainly run very well, though averse to a
plodding motion.

[He was probably thinking of a famous Edinburgh character, "Singing Jamie
Balfour." Jamie was found very drunk and adhering to the pavement one
night. He could not raise himself; but when helped to his feet, ran his
preserver a race to the tavern, and won!]

The account of the year's work which preceded "Guy Mannering" is given by
Lockhart, and is astounding. In 1814 Scott had written, Lockhart
believes, the greater part of the "Life of Swift," most of "Waverley" and
the "Lord of the Isles;" he had furnished essays to the "Encyclopaedia,"
and had edited "The Memorie of the Somervilles." The spider might well
seem spun out, the tilth exhausted. But Scott had a fertility, a
spontaneity, of fancy equall