or the rest of time, Providence, by the means of that great
mind, bestowed a new art, as it were, upon mankind--at the very time when
literature to all appearance was effete, and invention, for above a
century, had run in the cramped and worn-out channels of imitation. Gibbon
was lamenting that the subjects of history were exhausted, and that modern
story would never present the moving incidents of ancient story, on the
verge of the French Revolution and the European war--of the Reign of
Terror and the Moscow retreat. Such was the reply of Time to the complaint
that political incident was worn out. Not less decisive was the answer
which the genius of the Scottish bard afforded to the opinion, that the
treasures of original thought were exhausted, and that nothing now
remained for the sons of men. In the midst of that delusion he wrote
_Waverley_; and the effect was like the sun bursting through the clouds.
After a space, shorter than is usually required for a work of original
conception to make its way in society, the effect began to appear. Like
the invention of gunpowder or steam, it in the end worked a change in the
moral world. Envy was silenced; criticism was abashed; detraction ceased
to decry--malignity to deride. The hearts of men were taken as it were by
storm. A new vein of boundless extent and surpassing richness was opened
as it were under our feet. Men marvelled that it had been so long of being
found out. And the first discoverer worked it with such rapidity and
success, that for long no one attempted to disturb him in the turning
forth of its wealth.

It is curious, now that this great revolution in romance-writing has taken
place, and is felt and acknowledged by all the world, to reflect on the
causes, apparently accidental, by which it was brought about, and the
trivial circumstances which might have turned aside, perhaps for ever, the
creative mind of Scott from this its appropriate sphere of original
action. The first chapters of _Waverley_, as we learn from Lockhart's
Life, were written in 1808; but the work was laid aside in an unfinished
form, and was almost forgotten by its author. It would probably have
remained there overlooked and incomplete to the day of his death, had not
the extraordinary popularity of Lord Byron's _Childe Harold_ and
subsequent pieces, joined to some symptoms of waning public favour in the
reception of his own later pieces, particularly _Rokeby_ and the _Lord of
the Isles_,