ders, but Scott was justly famous; his works are
to-day in every library, and form a delightful part of the education of
every youth and maiden who cares to read at all; and he will as a
novelist probably live after some who are now prime favorites will be
utterly forgotten or ignored.

About 1830 Bulwer was in his early successes; about 1840 Dickens was the
rage of his day; about 1850 Thackeray had taken his high grade; and it
was about 1860 that George Eliot's power appeared. These still retain
their own peculiar lines of popularity,--Bulwer with the romantic few,
Thackeray with the appreciative intelligent, George Eliot with a still
wider clientage, and Dickens with everybody, on account of his appeal to
the universal sentiments of comedy and pathos. Scott's influence,
somewhat checked during the growth of these reputations and the
succession of fertile and accomplished writers on both sides of the
Atlantic,--including the introspective analysts of the past fifteen
years,--has within a decade been rising again, and has lately burst
forth in a new group of historical romancers who seem to have "harked
back" from the subjective fad of our day to Scott's healthy, adventurous
objectivity. Not only so, but new editions of the Waverley Novels are
coming one by one from the shrewd publishers who keep track of the
popular taste, one of the most attractive being issued in Edinburgh at
half-a-crown a volume.

The first of Scott's remarkable series of novels, "Waverley," published
in 1814 when the author was forty-three years of age and at the height
of his fame as a poet, took the fashionable and literary world by storm.
The novel had been partly written for several years, but was laid aside,
as his edition of Swift and his essays for the supplement of the
"Encyclopaedia Britannica," and other prose writings, employed all the
time he had to spare.

This hack-work was done by Scott without enthusiasm, to earn money for
his investment in real estate, and is not of transcendent merit.
Obscurer men than he had performed such literary drudgery with more
ability, but no writer was ever more industrious. The amount of work
which he accomplished at this period was prodigious, especially when we
remember that his duties as sheriff and clerk of Sessions occupied eight
months of the year. He was more familiar with the literary history of
Queen Anne's reign than any subsequent historian, if we except Macaulay,
whose brilliant career ha