careless and slovenly style is not much better:  for Scott had, perfectly, the style suited to his own work, and you cannot easily have a better style than that.  But there are two defects in him which were early detected by good and friendly judges:  and which are in fact natural results of the extraordinary force and fertility of his creative power.  One—­the less serious, but certainly to some extent a fault in art and a point in which he is distinguished for the worse from Shakespeare—­is that he is rather given to allow at first, to some of his personages, an elaborateness and apparent emphasis of drawing which seems to promise an importance for them in the story that they never actually attain.  Mike Lambourne in Kenilworth is a good example of this:  but there are many others.  The fact evidently was that, in the rush of the artist’s plastic imagination, other figures rose and overpowered these.  It is an excuse:  but it is hardly a justification.  The other and more serious is a tendency—­which grew on him and may no doubt have been encouraged by the astonishing pecuniary rewards of his work—­to hurry his conclusions, to “huddle up the cards and throw them into the bag,” as Lady Louisa Stuart told him.  There is one of the numerous, but it would seem generic and classifiable, forms of unpleasant dream in which the dreamer’s watch, to his consternation, suddenly begins to send its hands round at double and ten-fold speed.  Scott is rather apt to do this, towards the close of his novels, in his eagerness to begin something else.  These defects, however, are defects much more from the point of view of abstract criticism than from that of the pleasure of the reader:  while, even from the former, they are outweighed many times by merits.  And as regards our present method of estimation, they hardly count at all.

For, in that calculus, the important thing is that Scott, like Miss Austen, at once opened an immense new field to the novelist, and showed how that field was to be cultivated.  The complement-contrast of the pair can need emphasising only to those on whom no emphasis would be likely to impress it:  but it may not be quite so evident at once that between them they cover almost the entire possible ground of prose fiction.  The more striking and popular as well as more strictly novel style of Scott naturally attracted most attention at first:  indeed it can hardly be said that, for the next thirty years, much attempt was made to follow in Miss Austen’s steps, while such attempts as were made were seldom very good.[19] But there is no need to hurry Time:  and he generally knows what he is about.  At any rate he had, in and through these two provided—­for generations, probably for centuries, to come—­patterns and principles for whoso would to follow in prose fiction.