others; the striking utilisation of literary assistance in the Fortunes of Nigel; and the wonderful blending of autobiographic, historical, and romantic interest in Redgauntlet:—­one cannot dwell on these and other things.  The magic continued even in Woodstock—­written as this was almost between the blows of the executioner’s crow-bar on the wheel, in the tightening of the windlasses at the rack—­it is not absent, whatever people may say, in Anne of Geierstein, nor even quite lacking in the better parts of Count Robert of Paris.  But we must not expatiate on its effects; we must only give a little attention to the means by which they are achieved.

Another of the common errors about Scott is to represent—­perhaps really to regard—­him as a hit-or-miss and hand-to-mouth improvisatore, who bundled out his creations anyhow, and did not himself know how he created them.  The fallacy is worse than a fallacy:  for it is down-right false witness.  We have numerous passages in and out of the novels—­the chief of them being the remarkable conversation with Captain Clutterbuck in the Introduction to the Fortunes of Nigel and the reflections in the Diary on Sir John Chiverton and Brambletye House—­showing that Scott knew perfectly well the construction and the stringing of his fiddle, as well as the trick of applying his rosin.  But if we had not these direct testimonies, no one of any critical faculty could mistake the presence of consciously perceived principles in the books themselves.  A man does not suddenly, and by mere blind instinct, avoid such a pitfall as that of incongruous speech and manners, which has been noticed above.  It is not mere happy-go-lucky blundering which makes him invariably decline another into which people still fall—­the selection of historical personages of the first importance, and elaborately known, for the central figures of his novels.  Not to believe in luck is a mark of perhaps greater folly than to over-believe in it:  but luck will not always keep a man clear of such perils as that unskilful wedging of great blocks of mere history into his story, which the lesser historical novelists always commit, or that preponderance of mere narrative itself as compared with action and conversation from which even Dumas, even Thackeray, is not free.

That he knew what he was doing and what he had to do is thus certain; that he did it to an astounding extent is still more certain; but it would not skill much to deny that he did not always give himself time to do it perfectly in every respect, though it is perhaps not mere paradox or mere partisanship to suggest that if he had given himself more time, he would hardly have done better, and might have done worse.  The accusation of superficiality has been already glanced at:  and it is pretty certain that it argues more superficiality, of a much more hopeless kind, in those who make it.  The accusation of