care of the morrow. When my companion's worthy father and
uncle, after seeing two or three bottles go round, left the
juveniles to themselves, the weather being hot, we adjourned
to a library which had one large window looking northwards.
After carousing here for an hour or more, I observed that a
shade had come over the aspect of my friend, who happened to
be placed immediately opposite to myself, and said something
that intimated a fear of his being unwell. 'No,' said he, 'I
shall be well enough presently, if you will only let me sit
where you are, and take my chair; for there is a confounded
hand in sight of me here, which has often bothered me
before, and now it won't let me fill my glass with a good
will.' I rose to change places with him accordingly, and he
pointed out to me this hand, which, like the writing on
Belshazzar's wall, disturbed his hour of hilarity. 'Since we
sat down,' he said, 'I have been watching it--it fascinates
my eye--it never stops--page after page is finished, and
thrown on that heap of MS., and still it goes on unwearied;
and so it will be till candles are brought in, and God knows
how long after that. It is the same every night--I can't
stand a sight of it when I am not at my books.' 'Some
stupid, dogged engrossing clerk, probably,' exclaimed
myself, 'or some other giddy youth in our society.' 'No,
boys,' said our host; 'I well know what hand it is--'tis
Walter Scott's.'"[32]

If that is not extempore writing, it is difficult to say what
extempore writing is. But in truth, there is no evidence that any one
of the novels was laboured, or even so much as carefully composed.
Scott's method of composition was always the same; and, when writing
an imaginative work, the rate of progress seems to have been pretty
even, depending much more on the absence of disturbing engagements,
than on any mental irregularity. The morning was always his brightest
time; but morning or evening, in country or in town, well or ill,
writing with his own pen or dictating to an amanuensis in the
intervals of screaming-fits due to the torture of cramp in the
stomach, Scott spun away at his imaginative web almost as evenly as a
silkworm spins at its golden cocoon. Nor can I detect the slightest
trace of any difference in quality between the stories, such as can be
reasonably ascribed to comparati