“The last two volumes,” says Scott, in a letter to Mr. Morritt, “were written in three weeks.”  And here is Mr. Lockhart’s description of the effect which Scott’s incessant toil during the composition, produced on a friend whose window happened to command the novelist’s study:—­

“Happening to pass through Edinburgh in June, 1814, I dined one day with the gentleman in question (now the Honourable William Menzies, one of the Supreme Judges at the Cape of Good Hope), whose residence was then in George Street, situated very near to, and at right angles with, North Castle Street.  It was a party of very young persons, most of them, like Menzies and myself, destined for the Bar of Scotland, all gay and thoughtless, enjoying the first flush of manhood, with little remembrance of the yesterday, or care of the morrow.  When my companion’s worthy father and uncle, after seeing two or three bottles go round, left the juveniles to themselves, the weather being hot, we adjourned to a library which had one large window looking northwards.  After carousing here for an hour or more, I observed that a shade had come over the aspect of my friend, who happened to be placed immediately opposite to myself, and said something that intimated a fear of his being unwell.  ‘No,’ said he, ’I shall be well enough presently, if you will only let me sit where you are, and take my chair; for there is a confounded hand in sight of me here, which has often bothered me before, and now it won’t let me fill my glass with a good will.’  I rose to change places with him accordingly, and he pointed out to me this hand, which, like the writing on Belshazzar’s wall, disturbed his hour of hilarity.  ’Since we sat down,’ he said, ’I have been watching it—­it fascinates my eye—­it never stops—­page after page is finished, and thrown on that heap of MS., and still it goes on unwearied; and so it will be till candles are brought in, and God knows how long after that.  It is the same every night—­I can’t stand a sight of it when I am not at my books.’  ’Some stupid, dogged engrossing clerk, probably,’ exclaimed myself, ‘or some other giddy youth in our society.’  ’No, boys,’ said our host; ’I well know what hand it is—­’tis Walter Scott’s.’"[32]

If that is not extempore writing, it is difficult to say what extempore writing is.  But in truth, there is no evidence that any one of the novels was laboured, or even so much as carefully composed.  Scott’s method of composition was always the same; and, when writing an imaginative work, the rate of progress seems to have been pretty even, depending much more on the absence of disturbing engagements, than on any mental irregularity.  The morning was always his brightest time; but morning or evening, in country or in town, well or ill, writing with his own pen or dictating to an amanuensis in the intervals of screaming-fits due to the torture of cramp in the stomach, Scott spun away at his imaginative web almost