of his commercial speculation, and unwilling to betray it.  But he was far from ashamed of his literary enterprise, though it seems that he was at first very anxious lest a comparative failure, or even a mere moderate success, in a less ambitious sphere than that of poetry, should endanger the great reputation he had gained as a poet.  That was apparently the first reason for secrecy.  But, over and above this, it is clear that the mystery stimulated Scott’s imagination and saved him trouble as well.  He was obviously more free under the veil—­free from the liability of having to answer for the views of life or history suggested in his stories; but besides this, what was of more importance to him, the slight disguise stimulated his sense of humour, and gratified the whimsical, boyish pleasure which he always had in acting an imaginary character.  He used to talk of himself as a sort of Abou Hassan—­a private man one day, and acting the part of a monarch the next—­with the kind of glee which indicated a real delight in the change of parts, and I have little doubt that he threw himself with the more gusto into characters very different from his own, in consequence of the pleasure it gave him to conceive his friends hopelessly misled by this display of traits, with which he supposed that they could not have credited him even in imagination.  Thus besides relieving him of a host of compliments which he did not enjoy, and enabling him the better to evade an ill-bred curiosity, the disguise no doubt was the same sort of fillip to the fancy which a mask and domino or a fancy dress are to that of their wearers.  Even in a disguise a man cannot cease to be himself; but he can get rid of his improperly “imputed” righteousness—­often the greatest burden he has to bear—­and of all the expectations formed on the strength, as Mr. Clough says,—­

                    “Of having been what one has been,
    What one thinks one is, or thinks that others suppose one.”

To some men the freedom of this disguise is a real danger and temptation.  It never could have been so to Scott, who was in the main one of the simplest as well as the boldest and proudest of men.  And as most men perhaps would admit that a good deal of even the best part of their nature is rather suppressed than expressed by the name by which they are known in the world, Scott must have felt this in a far higher degree, and probably regarded the manifold characters under which he was known to society, as representing him in some respects more justly than any individual name could have done.  His mind ranged hither and thither over a wide field—­far beyond that of his actual experience,—­and probably ranged over it all the more easily for not being absolutely tethered to a single class of associations by any public confession of his authorship.  After all, when it became universally known that Scott was the only author of all these tales, it may be doubted whether the public thought as adequately of the imaginative