r Scott at
that time. But _Rokeby_ has little substance, though it includes more
than one of Scott's finest songs. _The Lord of the Isles_, though its
battle is not too far below _Marmion_, and though its hero is Robert the
Bruce, yet wants the original force of the earlier romances. When Scott
changed his hand from verse to prose for story-telling and wrote
_Waverley_, he not only gained in freedom and got room for a kind of
dialogue that was impossible in rhyme, but he came back to the same sort
of experience and the same strength of tradition as had given life to
the _Lay_. The time of _Waverley_ was no more than sixty years since,
when Scott began to write it and mislaid and forgot the opening chapters
in 1805; he got his ideas of the Forty-five from an old Highland
gentleman who had been out with the Highland clans, following the lead
of Prince Charles Edward, the Young Chevalier. The clans in that
adventure belonged to a world more ancient than that of _Ivanhoe_ or
_The Talisman_; they also belonged so nearly to Scott's own time that he
heard their story from one of themselves. He had spoken and listened to
another gentleman who had known Rob Roy. _The Bride of Lammermoor_ came
to him as the Icelandic family histories came to the historians of
Gunnar or Kjartan Olafsson. He had known the story all his life, and he
wrote it from tradition. The time of _The Heart of Midlothian_ is
earlier than _Waverley_, but it is more of a modern novel than an
historical romance, and even _Old Mortality_, which is earlier still, is
modern also; Cuddie Headrigg is no more antique than Dandie Dinmont or
the Ettrick Shepherd himself, and even his mother and her Covenanting
friends are not far from the fashion of some enthusiasts of Scott's own
time--e.g. Hogg's religious uncle who could not be brought to repeat his
old ballads for thinking of 'covenants broken, burned and buried.' _Guy
Mannering_ and _The Antiquary_ are both modern stories: it is not till
_Ivanhoe_ that Scott definitely starts on the regular historical novel
in the manner that was found so easy to imitate.

If _Rob Roy_ is not the very best of them all--and on problems of that
sort perhaps the right word may be the Irish phrase _Naboclish!_ ('don't
trouble about that!') which Scott picked up when he was visiting Miss
Edgeworth in Ireland--_Rob Roy_ shows well enough what Scott could do,
in romance of adventure and in humorous dialogue. The plots of his
novels are som