On the whole, I think the troubles with the Ballantyne brothers brought to light not only that eager gambling spirit in him, which his grandfather indulged with better success and more moderation when he bought the hunter with money destined for a flock of sheep, and then gave up gambling for ever, but a tendency still more dangerous, and in some respects involving an even greater moral defect,—­I mean a tendency, chiefly due, I think, to a very deep-seated pride,—­to prefer inferior men as working colleagues in business.  And yet it is clear that if Scott were to dabble in publishing at all, he really needed the check of men of larger experience, and less literary turn of mind.  The great majority of consumers of popular literature are not, and indeed will hardly ever be, literary men; and that is precisely why a publisher who is not, in the main, literary,—­who looks on authors’ MSS. for the most part with distrust and suspicion, much as a rich man looks at a begging-letter, or a sober and judicious fish at an angler’s fly,—­is so much less likely to run aground than such a man as Scott.  The untried author should be regarded by a wise publisher as a natural enemy,—­an enemy indeed of a class, rare specimens whereof will always be his best friends, and who, therefore, should not be needlessly affronted—­but also as one of a class 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.