in all his scholarly employments is sufficiently evident to anyone who
studies his work as a whole, and this fact might well serve as a motive
for such study. Yet it is only fair to remember that Scott was not a
novelist during these years when he was performing his most laborious
editorial tasks. We are accustomed to think of the brilliant use he was
afterwards to make of the knowledge he was gaining, but the motives
which influenced him were those of the man whose interest in literature
and history makes scholarly work seem the most natural way of earning
money. "These are studies, indeed, proverbially dull," he once wrote,
speaking of Horace Walpole's antiquarian researches, "but it is only
when they are pursued by those whose fancies nothing can enliven."[199]

_The Lives of the Novelists, and Comments on Other Eighteenth Century
Writers_

The _Novelists' Library_--Writers discussed--Value of the
_Lives_--General tone of competence in these essays--Scott's
catholic taste--Points of special interest in the
discussion--Relations of the novel and the drama--Supernatural
machinery in novels--Mistakes in the criticism of
Defoe--Realism--Motive in the novel--Aim of the prefaces--Scott's
familiarity with eighteenth century literature.

It has already been said that a large part of Scott's critical work
concerned itself with the eighteenth century. Of his greater editorial
labors two 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 l