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1805, " Border Minstrelsy " he had indeed previously written. 

 The sweet simplicity of diction endeared them to the hearts of 

 the people, and accounted for the immediate success and per- 

 manent charms of the poems. There was "in them the indis- 

 putable impress of worth, of genuine human force which hes in 

 some degree at the bottom of all popularity." Carlyle attributes 

 Walter Scott's hold upon the imagination of the people to the 

 vigorous whole-life he depicted. The reader was carried back 

 to rough strong times. . . . Brawny fighters, all cased in buff 

 and iron, their hearts too sheathed in oak and triple brass, 

 caprioled their huge war-horses, shook their death-doing spears ; 

 and went forth in the most determined manner, nothing doubt- 

 ing ; and in this new-found poetic world there was no call for 

 effort on the reader's part; he had not to struggle witli a 

 Browning, or a prose Browning in George Meredith, but what 

 excellence they had exhibited itself at a glance. " Of all the 

 poetry I know," says Ruskin, "none is so sorrowful as Scott's; 

 around all his power and brightness and sorrowful enjoyment of 

 eye and heart, the far-away iEolian knell is for ever sounding ; 

 there is not one of those loving or laughing glances of his but 

 it is the brighter for the film of tears. In Scott's love of beauty, 

 the love of colour is a leading element." 



The Waverley Novels. 



In the summer of 1814 Scott completed a fragment of a 

 Jacobite story begun in 1805, and then laid aside. Published 

 anonymously it took the world by storm ; " Waverley," as it was 

 called, became almost immediately a household word, and the 

 richest vein of Scott's genius was brought to Ught, and its gold 

 rescued from the caverns of forgetfulness to be for ever an orna- 

 ment to and the delight of the world. After Waverley, the novels 

 flowed in quick succession from the facile pen of the ready writer. 

 Scott's method was altogether extempore, indeed, he says himself, 

 that the two last volumes of Waverley " were written in three 

 weeks." The morning was his favourite time for work, and he 

 was then at his brightest ; page after page of MSS. was finished, 

 and thrown on a heap on the floor which rapidly increased in 

 dimensions as the hour of mid-day approached. There was no 

 check to his imaginative and creative power. " Print the talk of 

 any man," says Carlyle, " there will be a thick octavo volume 

 daily ; make his writing three times as good as his talk, there 

 will be the third part of a volume daily, which is still good work." 

 Scott's career is certainly the triumph and the excuse for ready 

 writing ; in the fourteen most effective years of Scott's literary 

 hfe, from 1814 to 1829, he wrote twenty-three novels, besides 

 shorter tales, and, as Mr. Hutton remarks, the best stories appear 

 to have been, on the whole, the most rapidly written, probably 



