may be considered as belonging to that period, for Ballantyne’s Novelists’ Library, though an enterprise which was commercially a failure and which consequently remained incomplete, may from the point of view of Scott’s contributions fitly be compared with the Dryden and the Swift.  Such parts as were published appeared in 1821.  The bulk of the volumes and the small type in which they were printed were considered to be the cause of their failure, and it was not until the critical biographies were extracted and published separately, by Galignani the Parisian bookseller, in 1825, that they seem to have attracted notice.

Scott wrote these Lives of the Novelists at a time when his hands were full of literary projects, altogether for John Ballantyne’s benefit.  The author afterwards spoke of them as “rather flimsily written,"[200] but we may surmise that to the fact that they were not the result of special study is due something of their ripeness of reflection and breadth of generalization.  “They contain a large assemblage of manly and sagacious remarks on human life and manners,"[201] wrote the Quarterly reviewer.

The writers considered were all British, with the exception of LeSage.  The choice, or at least the arrangement, seems more or less haphazard.  Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett naturally began the group, and Sterne followed after an interval.  Johnson and Goldsmith were treated briefly, for the prefaces were to be proportioned to the amount of work by each author included in the text.  Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, and Mrs. Radcliffe represented the Gothic romance.  Charles Johnstone, Robert Bage, and Richard Cumberland were among the inferior writers included.  Henry Mackenzie, who was still living and was a personal friend of Scott, completes the list so far as it went before the series was terminated by the publisher’s death.  When Scott’s Miscellaneous Prose Works were collected he added the lives of Charlotte Smith and Defoe, but in each of these cases the biographical portion was by another hand, the criticism being his own.[202]

The study of the novel as a genre was naturally undeveloped at that time.  Dunlop’s History of Prose Fiction had appeared in 1814, evidently a much more ambitious attempt than Scott’s; but Scott could treat the British novelists with comparative freedom from the trammels of any established precedent.  Of course his position as one who had struck out a wonderful new path in the writing of novels gave to his reflections on other novelists a very special interest.  The Lives of the Novelists are not to be neglected even now, and this is the more to be insisted on because the criticism of novels has been practiced with increasing zeal since Scott himself has become a classic and since his successors have made this field of literature more varied and popular, if not greater, than the first masters made it.  A recent writer on eighteenth century literature says:  “By far the best criticism of the eighteenth century novelists will be found in the prefatory notices contributed by Scott to Ballantyne’s Novelists’ Library."[203] But the same writer adds:  “Sir Walter Scott, indeed, considered Fathom superior to Jonathan Wild, an opinion which must always remain one of the mysteries of criticism."[204]