" In this
matter of denouements he certainly was no more careful than Shakspeare or
Moliere.
The permanence of Sir Walter's romances is proved, as we said, by their
survival among all the changes of fashion in the art of fiction. When he
took up his pen to begin "Waverley," fiction had not absorbed, as it does
to-day, almost all the best imaginative energy of English or foreign
writers. Now we hear of "art" on every side, and every novelist must give
the world his opinion about schools and methods. Scott, on the other
hand, lived in the greatest poetical ago since that of Elizabeth. Poetry
or the drama (in which, to be sure, few succeeded) occupied Wordsworth,
Byron, Coleridge, Shelley, Crabbe, Campbell, and Keats. Then, as Joanna
Baillie hyperbolically declared, "The Scotch novels put poetry out of
fashion."
[Abbotsford Manuscripts. Hogg averred that nobody either read or wrote
poetry after Sir Walter took to prose.]
Till they appeared, novels seem to have been left to readers like the
plaintive lady's-maid whom Scott met at Dalkeith, when he beheld "the
fair one descend from the carriage with three half-bound volumes of a
novel in her hand.
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