ever be able to take
the trouble; and yet to make the world stare, and gain a new march ahead
of them all! Well, something we still will do."[401]

By an easy extension of his principle, he came to believe that novelty
would always succeed for a time. The opinion is expressed often in his
reviews, and in his journal and letters is applied to his own work. So
it was that when any one of his books seemed partially to fail with the
public, his immediate impulse was to look for something new to be
done.[402] One of his schemes was a work on popular superstitions,
projected when _Quentin Durward_ seemed to be falling flat; but the
success of the novel made the immediate execution of the plan
unnecessary.[403]

It was largely his desire to secure variety that encouraged him to
undertake historical writing. He had also a theory about how history
should be written, and so he felt that the novelty would consist in
something more than the fact that the Author of Waverley had taken a new
line. He wished, as Thackeray did later when he proposed to write a
history of the Age of Queen Anne, to use in an avowedly serious book the
material with which he had stored his imagination; and he believed he
could present it with a vivacity that was not characteristic of
professional historians. The success of the first series of _Tales of a
Grandfather_ served to confirm the opinion he had expressed about
them,--"I care not who knows it, I think well of them. Nay, I will hash
history with anybody, be he who he will."[404]

Scott had a very just sense of the value of his great stores of
information. He did say that he would give one half his knowledge if so
he might put the other half upon a well-built foundation,[405] but as
years went on he learned to use with ease the accumulations of knowledge
which in his youth had proved often unwieldy; and more than once he
congratulated himself that he beat his imitators by possessing
historical and antiquarian lore which they could only acquire by
"reading up."[406] Though he testified that in the beginning of his
first novel he described his own education, he could hardly apply to
himself what is there said of Waverley, that, "While he was thus
permitted to read only for the gratification of his amusement, he
foresaw not that he was losing forever the opportunity of acquiring
habits of firm and assiduous application, of gaining the art of
controlling, directing, and concentrating the powers of his