ogether.
A certain form of huddled and not altogether probable catastrophe, a
knack of introducing in the earlier part of the story, as if big with
fate, personages who afterwards play but a subordinate part, and one or
two other things, might be urged against Sir Walter. But, on the whole,
no artist is less chargeable with stereotype than he. His characters are
hardly ever doubles; their relationships (certain general connections
excepted, which are practically the scaffolding of the romance in
itself) do not repeat themselves; the backgrounds, however much or
however little strict local colour they may have, are always
sufficiently differentiated. They have the variety, as they have the
truth, of nature.

No detailed account can here be attempted of the marvellous rapidity and
popularity of the series of novels from the appearance of _Waverley_
till just before the author's death eighteen years later. The anecdotage
of the matter is enormous. The books were from the first anonymous, and
for some time the secret of their authorship was carefully and on the
whole successfully preserved. Even several years after the beginning, so
acute a judge as Hazlitt, though he did not entertain, thought it
necessary seriously to discuss, the suggestion that Godwin wrote
them,--a suggestion which, absurd as, with our illegitimate advantage of
distance and perspective, we see it to be, was less nonsensical than it
seems to those who forget that at the date of the appearance of
_Waverley_ there was no novelist who could have been selected with more
plausibility. After a time this and that were put together, and a critic
of the name of Adolphus constructed an argument of much ingenuity and
shrewdness to show that the author of _Marmion_ and the _Lady of the
Lake_ must be the author of _Waverley_. But the secret was never
regularly divulged till Sir Walter's misfortunes, referred to in the
section on his poetry, made further concealment not so much useless as
impossible in the first place, and positively detrimental in the second.
The series was dauntlessly continued, despite the drag of the
_Napoleon_, the necessity of attempting other work that would bring in
money, and above all the strain on the faculties both of imagination and
labour which domestic as well as pecuniary misfortunes imposed. Nor did
Scott, it may be fearlessly, asserted, though it is not perhaps the
general opinion, ever publish any "dotages," with the possible excep