When Scott was obliged to make as much money as possible he wrote novels and histories rather than criticism.  His Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, which appeared in nine volumes in 1827, enabled him to make the first large payment on the debts that had fallen upon him in the financial crash of the preceding year, and the Tales of a Grandfather were among the most successful of his later books.  His critical biographies and many of his other essays were brought together for the first time in 1827, and issued under the title of Miscellaneous Prose Works.  The world of books was making his life weary with its importunate demands in those years when he was writing to pay his debts, and it is pleasant to see that some of his later reviews discussed matters that were not less dear to his heart because they were not literary.  The articles on fishing, on ornamental gardening, on planting waste lands, remind us of the observation he once made, that his oaks would outlast his laurels.

By this time the “Author of Waverley” was no longer the “unknown.”  His business complications compelled him to give his name to the novels, and with the loss of a certain kind of privacy he gained the freedom of which later he made such fortunate use in annotating his own works.  From the beginning of 1828 until the end of his life in 1832, Scott was engaged, in the intervals of other occupations, in writing these introductions and notes for his novels, for an edition which he always called the Opus Magnum.  This was a pleasant task, charmingly done.  Indeed we may call it the last of those great editorial labors by which Scott’s fame might live unsupported by anything else.  First came the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, then the editions of Dryden and Swift.  Next we may count the Lives of the Novelists, even in the fragmentary state in which the failure of the Novelists’ Library left them; and finally the Opus Magnum.  When, in addition, we remember the mass of his critical work written for periodicals, and the number of minor volumes he edited, it becomes evident that a study of Scott which disregards this part of his work can present only a one-sided view of his achievement.  And the qualities of his abundant criticism, especially its large fresh sanity, seem to make it worthy of closer analysis than it usually receives, not only because it helps to reveal Scott’s genius, but also on account of the historical and ethical importance which always attaches to the ideals, literary and other, of a noble man and a great writer.

CHAPTER II

SCOTT’S QUALIFICATIONS AS CRITIC