s in character before
committing them to paper, to assure himself of their being in complete
consonance with what the character and situation required.

So far from affording any argument to the contrary, the history of the
years during which Sir Walter's hand was losing its cunning seems to
illustrate the penalty of trying to reconcile two irreconcilable
things--the exercise of the imagination to its fullest extent, and the
observance of conditions that are too healthy to nourish a fever.
Apropos of his review of Ritson's "Caledonian Annals," he himself says:
"No one that has not labored as I have done on imaginary topics can
judge of the comfort afforded by walking on all-fours, and being grave
and dull." There spoke the man who habitually, and without artificial
help, drew upon his imagination at the hours when instinct has told
others they should be employing, not their fancy, but their reason. The
privilege of being healthily dull before breakfast must have been an
intense relief to one who compelled himself to do unhealthy or abnormal
work without the congenial help of abnormal conditions. Herder, in like
manner, is accused by De Quincey, in direct terms, of having broken
down prematurely because he "led a life of most exemplary temperance.
Surely, if he had been a drunkard or an opium-eater, he might have
contrived to weather the point of sixty years." This is putting things
pretty strongly; but it is said of a man of great imaginative power by a
man of great imaginative power, and may, therefore, be taken as the
opinion of an expert, all the more honest because he is prejudiced. A
need must be strongly felt to be expressed with such daring contempt for
popular axioms.

The true working-life of Scott, who helped nature by no artificial
means, lasted for no more than twelve years, from the publication of
"Waverley" until the year in which his genius was put into harness; so
that, of the two men, Scott and Balzac, who both began a literary life
at nearly the same age, and were both remarkable for splendid
constitutions, the man who lived abnormally surpassed the man who lived
healthily by fully eight years of good work, and kept his imagination in
full vigor to the end.

It is amusing to read Sir Walter's candid avowal, when beginning the
third volume of "Woodstock," that he "had not the slightest idea how the
story was to be wound up to a catastrophe." He declares he never could
lay down a plan--or that, if he