of whom nineteen out of every
twenty will dangle before the publisher's eyes wiles and hopes and
expectations of the most dangerous and illusory character,--which
constitute indeed the very perils that it is his true function in life
skilfully to evade. The Ballantynes were quite unfit for this
function; first, they had not the experience requisite for it; next,
they were altogether too much under Scott's influence. No wonder that
the partnership came to no good, and left behind it the germs of
calamity even more serious still.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 30: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, viii. 221.]

[Footnote 31: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, v. 218.]

CHAPTER X.

THE WAVERLEY NOVELS.

In the summer of 1814, Scott took up again and completed--almost at a
single heat,--a fragment of a Jacobite story, begun in 1805 and then
laid aside. It was published anonymously, and its astonishing success
turned back again the scales of Scott's fortunes, already inclining
ominously towards a catastrophe. This story was _Waverley_. Mr.
Carlyle has praised _Waverley_ above its fellows. "On the whole,
contrasting _Waverley_, which was carefully written, with most of its
followers which were written extempore, one may regret the extempore
method." This is, however, a very unfortunate judgment. Not one of the
whole series of novels appears to have been written more completely
extempore than the great bulk of _Waverley_, including almost
everything that made it either popular with the million or fascinating
to the fastidious; and it is even likely that this is one of the
causes of its excellence.

"The last two volumes," says Scott, in a letter to Mr. Morritt, "were
written in three weeks." And here is Mr. Lockhart's description of the
effect which Scott's incessant toil during the composition, produced
on a friend whose window happened to command the novelist's study:--

"Happening to pass through Edinburgh in June, 1814, I dined
one day with the gentleman in question (now the Honourable
William Menzies, one of the Supreme Judges at the Cape of
Good Hope), whose residence was then in George Street,
situated very near to, and at right angles with, North
Castle Street. It was a party of very young persons, most of
them, like Menzies and myself, destined for the Bar of
Scotland, all gay and thoughtless, enjoying the first flush
of manhood, with little remembrance of the yesterday, or