in
return."[113]

Scott disclaimed any special knowledge of stage-craft. "I know as little
about the division of a drama as the spinster about the division of a
battle, to use Iago's simile,"[114] he once wrote to a friend. Yet as a
critic he had of course some general ideas about the making of plays,
without having worked out any subtle theories on the subject. In
criticising a play by Allan Cunningham, who had asked for his judgment
on it, he remarked first that the plot was ill-combined. "If the mind
can be kept upon one unbroken course of interest, the effect even in
perusal is more gratifying. I have always considered this as the great
secret in dramatic poetry, and conceive it one of the most difficult
exercises of the invention possible, to conduct a story through five
acts, developing it gradually in every scene, so as to keep up the
attention, yet never till the very conclusion permitting the nature of
the catastrophe to become visible,--and all the while to accompany this
by the necessary delineation of character and beauty of language."[115]
And again he said to the same person, "I hope you will make another
dramatic attempt; and in that case I would strongly recommend that you
should previously make a model or skeleton of your incidents, dividing
them regularly into scenes and acts, so as to insure the dependence of
one circumstance upon another, and the simplicity and union of your
whole story."[116] Here we find Scott giving advice which by his own
admission he was not himself able to follow in the composition of
fiction. "I never could lay down a plan, or having laid it down I never
could adhere to it," he wrote in his journal[117]. And the "Author" in
the introductory epistle to _Nigel_ remarks, "It may pass for one good
reason for not writing a play, that I cannot form a plot."

The few experiments that he made he did not seem to regard seriously at
any time, though he was rather favorably impressed on rereading the
_Doom of Devorgoil_ after it had lain unused for several years.[118] Of
_Halidon Hill_ he said, "It is designed to illustrate military
antiquities and the manners of chivalry. The drama (if it can be called
one) is in no particular either designed or calculated for the
stage."[119] He seems to have been "often urged" to write plays, if one
may trust Captain Clutterbuck's authority, and the effectiveness of the
many poetical mottoes improvised by the Author of Waverley for the
chapters of