Believing from the beginning of his career that novelty was the chief merit of his work, he was prepared to live up to his principles.  So it was that when he was “beaten” by Byron in metrical romances, he dropped with hardly a regret, so far as we can judge, the kind of writing in which he had attained such remarkable popularity, and turned to another kind.  “Since one line has failed, we must just stick to something else,” he remarked, calmly.[397] This was when the small sales of The Lord of the Isles as compared with the earlier poems warned Scott and his publisher in a very tangible way that the field had been captured by Byron.  At this time Waverley was in the market and Guy Mannering was in process of composition.  Though it was to his poetry that he chose to give his name, Scott had little reason to feel forlorn, as the sale of the novels from the very beginning was a pretty effective consolation for any possible hurt to his vanity.  He could have owned them as his at any moment, had he chosen to do so.  He did not read criticisms of his books, but was satisfied, as one of his friends observed, “to accept the intense avidity with which his novels are read, the enormous and continued sale of his works, as a sufficient commendation of them."[398] In the case of Byron, as always when the public approved the works of one of his brother authors, he considered the popular judgment right.

Scott did not altogether stop writing poetry, however, as is sometimes supposed. The Field of Waterloo and Harold the Dauntless were both written after this time; and the mottoes and lyrics in the novels compose a delightful body of verse.  The fact seems to be that he lost zest for writing long poems, partly because of the favor with which Byron’s poems were received, and his own consequent feeling of inferiority in poetic composition; partly because of his discovery of the greater ease with which he could write prose, and the greater scope it gave him.  The more ambitious attempts among the poems which he wrote after 1814 are comparative failures.  But the poetry in his nature prevented him from entirely giving over the composition of verse, and he found real delight in the occasional writing of short pieces that required no continued effort.  They were usually made to be used in the novels, for after the publication of Guy Mannering novel-writing became specifically Scott’s occupation.[399]

The price of his success in any direction was that he was unable to keep his field to himself.  Having set a fashion, he was more than once annoyed by the crowd who wrote in his style and made him feel the necessity of striking out a new line.[400] It was comparatively easy for the vigorous man who wrote Waverley, but in the end, when through his losses he was more than ever obliged to hit the popular taste, to feel that he must find a new style seemed a hard fate.  Yet he meant to be beforehand in the race.  This