Since we sat down I have been watching that confounded hand—­it fascinates my eye.  It never stops—­page after page is finished and thrown on the heap of manuscript, and still it goes on unwearied—­and so it will be until candles are brought in, and God knows how long after that.  It is the same every night.

The great merits of such a nature and the method that is its outcome should not blind us to its dangers, some of which Scott did not escape.  Schoolboys to-day are able to point out defects in his style, glibly talking of loosely-built sentences, redundancies, diffuseness, or what not.  He seems long-winded to the rising generation, and it may be said in their defense that there are Novels of Scott which if cut down one-third would be improved.  Critics, too, speak of his anachronisms, his huddled endings, the stiffness of his young gentleman heroes, his apparent indifference to the laws of good construction; as well as of his Tory limitations, the ponderosity of his manner and the unmodernness of his outlook on the world along with the simple superficiality of his psychology.  All this may cheerfully be granted, and yet the Scott lover will stoutly maintain that the spirit and the truth are here, that the Waverley books possess the great elements of fiction-making:  not without reason did they charm Europe as well as the English-speaking lands for twenty years.  The Scott romances will always be mentioned, with the work of Burns, Carlyle and Stevenson, when Scotland’s contribution to English letters is under discussion; his position is fortified as he recedes into the past, which so soon engulfs lesser men.  And it is because he was one of the world’s natural storytellers:  his career is an impressive object-lesson for those who would elevate technique above all else.

He produced romances which dealt with English history centuries before his own day, or with periods near his time:  Scotch romances of like kind which had to do with the historic past of his native land:  romances of humbler life and less stately entourage, the scenes of which were laid nearer, sometimes almost within his own day.  He was, in instances, notably successful in all these kinds, but perhaps most of all in the stories falling in the two categories last-named:  which, like “Old Mortality,” have the full flavor of Scotch soil.

The nature of the Novels he was to produce became evident with the first of them all, “Waverley.”  Here is a border tale which narrates the adventures of a scion of that house among the loyal Highlanders temporarily a rebel to the reigning English sovereign and a recruit in the interests of the young pretender:  his fortunes, in love and war, and his eventual reinstatement in the King’s service and happiness with the woman of his choice.  While it might be too sweeping to say that there was in this first romance (which has never ranked with his best) the whole secret of the Scott historical story, it is true that the book