The many romantic Novels written by Scott can be separated into two groups, marked by a cleavage of time:  the year being 1819, the date of the publication of “Ivanhoe.”  In the earlier group, containing the fiction which appeared during the five years from 1814 to 1819, we find world-welcomed masterpieces which are an expression of the unforced first fruits of his genius:  the three series of “Tales of My Landlord,” “Guy Mannering,” “Rob Roy,” “The Heart of Midlothian” and “Old Mortality,” to mention the most conspicuous.  To the second division belong stories equally well known, many of them impressive:  “The Monastery,” “Kenilworth,” “Quentin Durward,” and “Red Gauntlet” among them, but as a whole marking a falling off of power as increasing years and killing cares made what was at first hardly more than a sportive effort, a burden under which a man, at last broken, staggered toward the desired goal.  There is no manlier, more gallant spectacle offered in the annals of literature than this of Walter Scott, silent partner in a publishing house and ruined by its failure after he has set up country gentleman and gratified his expensive taste for baronial life, as he buckles to, and for weary years strives to pay off by the product of his pen the obligations incurred; his executors were able to clear his estate of debt.  It was an immense drudgery (with all allowance for its moments of creative joy) accomplished with high spirits and a kind of French gayety.  Nor, though the best quality of the work was injured towards the end of the long task, and Scott died too soon at sixty-one, was the born raconteur in him choked by this grim necessity of grind.  There have been in modern fiction a few masters, and but a few, who were natural improvisatori:  conspicuous among them are Dumas the elder and Walter Scott.  Such writers pour forth from a very spring of effortless power invention after invention, born of the impulse of a rich imagination, a mind stored with bountiful material for such shaping, and a nature soaked with the humanities.  They are great lovers of life, great personalities, gifted, resourceful, unstinted in their giving, ever with something of the boy in them, the careless prodigals of literature.  Often it seems as if they toiled not to acquire the craft of the writer, nor do they lose time over the labor of the file.  To the end, they seem in a way like glorious amateurs.  They are at the antipodes of those careful craftsmen with whom all is forethought, plan and revision.  Scott, fired by a period, a character or scene, commonly sat down without seeing his way through and wrote currente calamo, letting creation take care of its own.  The description of him by a contemporary is familiar where he was observed at a window, reeling off the manuscript sheets of his first romance.