as evenly as a silkworm spins at its golden cocoon.  Nor can I detect the slightest trace of any difference in quality between the stories, such as can be reasonably ascribed to comparative care or haste.  There are differences, and even great differences, of course, ascribable to the less or greater suitability of the subject chosen to Scott’s genius, but I can find no trace of the sort of cause to which Mr. Carlyle refers.  Thus, few, I suppose, would hesitate to say that while Old Mortality is very near, if not quite, the finest of Scott’s works, The Black Dwarf is not far from the other end of the scale.  Yet the two were written in immediate succession (The Black Dwarf being the first of the two), and were published together, as the first series of Tales of my Landlord, in 1816.  Nor do I think that any competent critic would find any clear deterioration of quality in the novels of the later years,—­excepting of course the two written after the stroke of paralysis.  It is true, of course, that some of the subjects which most powerfully stirred his imagination were among his earlier themes, and that he could not effectually use the same subject twice, though he now and then tried it.  But making allowance for this consideration, the imaginative power of the novels is as astonishingly even as the rate of composition itself.  For my own part, I greatly prefer The Fortunes of Nigel (which was written in 1822) to Waverley which was begun in 1805, and finished in 1814, and though very many better critics would probably decidedly disagree, I do not think that any of them would consider this preference grotesque or purely capricious.  Indeed, though Anne of Geierstein,—­the last composed before Scott’s stroke,—­would hardly seem to any careful judge the equal of Waverley, I do not much doubt that if it had appeared in place of Waverley, it would have excited very nearly as much interest and admiration; nor that had Waverley appeared in 1829, in place of Anne of Geierstein, it would have failed to excite very much more.  In these fourteen most effective years of Scott’s literary life, during which he wrote twenty-three novels besides shorter tales, the best stories appear to have been on the whole the most rapidly written, probably because they took the strongest hold of the author’s imagination.

Till near the close of his career as an author, Scott never avowed his responsibility for any of these series of novels, and even took some pains to mystify the public as to the identity between the author of Waverley and the author of Tales of my Landlord.  The care with which the secret was kept is imputed by Mr. Lockhart in some degree to the habit of mystery which had grown upon Scott during his secret partnership with the Ballantynes; but in this he seems to be confounding two very different phases of Scott’s character.  No doubt he was, as a professional man, a little ashamed