_, and _Proud Maisie is in the
Wood_, which have a greater intensity and compression than his metrical
tales.

From 1814 to 1831 Scott wrote and published the _Waverley_ novels, some
thirty in number; if we consider the amount of work done, the speed with
which it was done, and the general average of excellence maintained,
perhaps the most marvelous literary feat on record. The series was
issued anonymously, and takes its name from the first number: _Waverley,
or 'Tis Sixty Years Since_. This was founded upon the rising of the
clans, in 1745, in support of the Young Pretender, Charles Edward
Stuart, and it revealed to the English public that almost foreign
country which lay just across their threshold, the Scottish Highlands.
The _Waverley_ novels remain, as a whole, unequaled as historical
fiction, although here and there a single novel, like George Eliot's
_Romola_, or Thackeray's _Henry Esmond_, or Kingsley's _Hypatia_, may
have attained a place beside the best of them. They were a novelty when
they appeared. English prose fiction had somewhat declined since the
time of Fielding and Goldsmith. There were truthful, though rather tame,
delineations of provincial life, like Jane Austen's _Sense and
Sensibility_, 1811, and _Pride and Prejudice_, 1813; or Maria
Edgeworth's _Popular Tales_, 1804. On the other hand, there were Gothic
romances, like the _Monk_ of Matthew Gregory Lewis, to whose _Tales of
Wonder_ some of Scott's translations from the German had been
contributed; or like Anne Radcliffe's _Mysteries of Udolpho_. The great
original of this school of fiction was Horace Walpole's _Castle of
Otranto_, 1765; an absurd tale of secret trap-doors, subterranean
vaults, apparitions of monstrous mailed figures and colossal helmets,
pictures that descend from their frames, and hollow voices that proclaim
the ruin of ancient families.

Scott used the machinery of romance, but he was not merely a romancer,
or an historical novelist even, and it is not, as Carlyle implies, the
buff-belts and jerkins which principally interest us in his heroes.
_Ivanhoe_ and _Kenilworth_ and the _Talisman_ are, indeed, romances pure
and simple, and very good romances at that. But, in novels such as _Rob
Roy_, the _Antiquary_, the _Heart of Midlothian_, and the _Bride of
Lammermoor_, Scott drew from contemporary life, and from his intimate
knowledge of Scotch character. The story is there, with its entanglement
of plot and its exciting advent