is the record in his Journal:  “Hard pressed as I am by these imitators, who must put the thing out of fashion at last, I consider, like a fox at his last shifts, whether there be a way to dodge them—­some new device to throw them off, and have a mile or two of free ground while I have legs and wind left to use it.  There is one way to give novelty:  to depend for success on the interest of a well-contrived story.  But woe’s me! that requires thought, consideration—­the writing out a regular plan or plot—­above all, the adhering to one—­which I never can do, for the ideas rise as I write, and bear such a disproportioned extent to that which each occupied at the first concoction, that (cocksnowns!) I shall never be able to take the trouble; and yet to make the world stare, and gain a new march ahead of them all!  Well, something we still will do."[401]

By an easy extension of his principle, he came to believe that novelty would always succeed for a time.  The opinion is expressed often in his reviews, and in his journal and letters is applied to his own work.  So it was that when any one of his books seemed partially to fail with the public, his immediate impulse was to look for something new to be done.[402] One of his schemes was a work on popular superstitions, projected when Quentin Durward seemed to be falling flat; but the success of the novel made the immediate execution of the plan unnecessary.[403]

It was largely his desire to secure variety that encouraged him to undertake historical writing.  He had also a theory about how history should be written, and so he felt that the novelty would consist in something more than the fact that the Author of Waverley had taken a new line.  He wished, as Thackeray did later when he proposed to write a history of the Age of Queen Anne, to use in an avowedly serious book the material with which he had stored his imagination; and he believed he could present it with a vivacity that was not characteristic of professional historians.  The success of the first series of Tales of a Grandfather served to confirm the opinion he had expressed about them,—­“I care not who knows it, I think well of them.  Nay, I will hash history with anybody, be he who he will."[404]

Scott had a very just sense of the value of his great stores of information.  He did say that he would give one half his knowledge if so he might put the other half upon a well-built foundation,[405] but as years went on he learned to use with ease the accumulations of knowledge which in his youth had proved often unwieldy; and more than once he congratulated himself that he beat his imitators by possessing historical and antiquarian lore which they could only acquire by “reading up."[406] Though he testified that in the beginning of his first novel he described his own education, he could hardly apply to himself what is there said of Waverley, that, “While he was thus permitted to read only for the gratification of his amusement,