gayety. Nor, though the best
quality of the work was injured towards the end of the long
task, and Scott died too soon at sixty-one, was the born
raconteur in him choked by this grim necessity of grind. There
have been in modern fiction a few masters, and but a few, who
were natural improvisatori: conspicuous among them are Dumas the
elder and Walter Scott. Such writers pour forth from a very
spring of effortless power invention after invention, born of
the impulse of a rich imagination, a mind stored with bountiful
material for such shaping, and a nature soaked with the
humanities. They are great lovers of life, great personalities,
gifted, resourceful, unstinted in their giving, ever with
something of the boy in them, the careless prodigals of
literature. Often it seems as if they toiled not to acquire the
craft of the writer, nor do they lose time over the labor of the
file. To the end, they seem in a way like glorious amateurs.
They are at the antipodes of those careful craftsmen with whom
all is forethought, plan and revision. Scott, fired by a period,
a character or scene, commonly sat down without seeing his way
through and wrote currente calamo, letting creation take care of
its own. The description of him by a contemporary is familiar
where he was observed at a window, reeling off the manuscript
sheets of his first romance.

Since we sat down I have been watching that confounded
hand--it fascinates my eye. It never stops--page after page
is finished and thrown on the heap of manuscript, and still
it goes on unwearied--and so it will be until candles are
brought in, and God knows how long after that. It is the
same every night.

The great merits of such a nature and the method that is its
outcome should not blind us to its dangers, some of which Scott
did not escape. Schoolboys to-day are able to point out defects
in his style, glibly talking of loosely-built sentences,
redundancies, diffuseness, or what not. He seems long-winded to
the rising generation, and it may be said in their defense that
there are Novels of Scott which if cut down one-third would be
improved. Critics, too, speak of his anachronisms, his huddled
endings, the stiffness of his young gentleman heroes, his
apparent indifference to the laws of good construction; as well
as of his Tory limitations, the ponderosity of his manner and
the unmodernness of his outlook on the world along with the
simple superfici