scribing their success
to extraordinary excellence, and he settled down to the opinion that it
was simply their novelty that the public cared for. The enthusiastic
welcome given him by the Irish when he visited Dublin caused him to say
in one of his letters, "Were it not from the chilling recollection that
novelty is easily substituted for merit, I should think, like the booby
in Steele's play,[392] that I had been kept back, and that there was
something more about me than I had ever been led to suspect."[393]

He assumed that he had studied popular taste enough to have some
knowledge of its shiftings, so that he might "set every sail towards the
breeze."[394] "I may be mistaken," he once wrote, "but I do think the
tale of Elspat M'Tavish in my bettermost manner, but J.B. roars for
chivalry. He does not quite understand that everything may be overdone
in this world, or sufficiently estimate the necessity of novelty. The
Highlanders have been off the field now for some time."[395] His comment
on _Ivanhoe_ was still more emphatic. "Novelty is what this giddy-paced
time demands imperiously, and I certainly studies as much as I could to
get out of the old beaten track, leaving those who like to keep the
road, which I have rutted pretty well."[396]

Believing from the beginning of his career that novelty was the chief
merit of his work, he was prepared to live up to his principles. So it
was that when he was "beaten" by Byron in metrical romances, he dropped
with hardly a regret, so far as we can judge, the kind of writing in
which he had attained such remarkable popularity, and turned to another
kind. "Since one line has failed, we must just stick to something else,"
he remarked, calmly.[397] This was when the small sales of _The Lord of
the Isles_ as compared with the earlier poems warned Scott and his
publisher in a very tangible way that the field had been captured by
Byron. At this time _Waverley_ was in the market and _Guy Mannering_ was
in process of composition. Though it was to his poetry that he chose to
give his name, Scott had little reason to feel forlorn, as the sale of
the novels from the very beginning was a pretty effective consolation
for any possible hurt to his vanity. He could have owned them as his at
any moment, had he chosen to do so. He did not read criticisms of his
books, but was satisfied, as one of his friends observed, "to accept the
intense avidity with which his novels are read, the enormous a