reality gone
straight to man as man; he had varied the particular trapping only to
exhibit the universal substance. The Baron of Bradwardine, Dandie
Dinmont, Edie Ochiltree, Mause Headrigg, Bailie Jarvie, and the long
list of originals down to Oliver Proudfute and even later, their less
eccentric companions from Fergus MacIvor to Queen Margaret, may derive
part of their appeal from dialect and colouring, from picturesque
"business" and properties. But the chief of that appeal lies in the fact
that they are all men and women of the world, of life, of time in
general; that even when their garments, even when their words are a
little out of fashion, there is real flesh and blood beneath the
garments, real thought and feeling behind the words. It may be urged by
the Devil's Advocate, and is not wholly susceptible of denial by his
opponent, that, after the first four or five books, the enormous gains
open to Scott first tempted, and the heroic efforts afterwards demanded
of him later compelled, the author to put not quite enough of himself
and his knowledge into his work, to "pad" if not exactly to "scamp" a
little. Yet it is the fact that some of his very best work was not only
very rapidly written, but written under such circumstances of bodily
suffering and mental worry as would have made any work at all
impossible to most men. And, on the whole, it is perhaps as idle to
speculate whether this work might have been better, as it is ungenerous
to grumble that it ought to have been. For after all it is such a body
of literature as, for complete liberation from any debts to models,
fertility and abundance of invention, nobility of sentiment, variety and
keenness of delight, nowhere else exists as the work of a single author
in prose.

It was certain that an example so fascinating in itself, and of such
extraordinary profit in fame and fortune to the author, would be
followed. It was said with sufficient accuracy that Scott's novels, at
the best of his career, brought him in about L15,000 a year, a sum
previously undreamt of by authors; while their reputation overshadowed
not only all others in England, but all others throughout Europe. And it
is rather surprising, and shows how entirely Scott had the priority in
this field, that it was not for six or seven years at least that any
noteworthy attempts in his manner appeared, while it can scarcely be
said that in England anything of very great value was published in it
before h