open to Scott first tempted, and the heroic efforts afterwards demanded of him later compelled, the author to put not quite enough of himself and his knowledge into his work, to "pad" if not exactly to "scamp" a little. Yet it is the fact that some of his very best work was not only very rapidly written, but written under such circumstances of bodily suffering and mental worry as would have made any work at all impossible to most men. And, on the whole, it is perhaps as idle to speculate whether this work might have been better, as it is ungenerous to grumble that it ought to have been. For after all it is such a body of literature as, for complete liberation from any debts to models, fertility and abundance of invention, nobility of sentiment, variety and keenness of delight, nowhere else exists as the work of a single author in prose. It was certain that an example so fascinating in itself, and of such extraordinary profit in fame and fortune to the author, would be followed. It was said with sufficient accuracy that Scott's novels, at the best of his career, brought him in about L15,000 a year, a sum previously undreamt of by authors; while their reputation overshadowed not only all others in England, but all others throughout Europe. And it is rather surprising, and shows how entirely Scott had the priority in this field, that it was not for six or seven years at least that any noteworthy attempts in his manner appeared, while it can scarcely be said that in England anything of very great value was published in it before his death. In the last ten years of his life, however, imitations, chiefly of his historical style, did appear in great numbers; and he has left in his diary an extremely interesting, a very good-natured, but a very shrewd and just criticism upon them in general, and upon two in particular--the _Brambletye House_ of Horace Smith, one of the authors of the delightful parodies called _Rejected Addresses_, and the first book, _Sir John Chiverton_, of an author who was to continue writing for some half century, and at times to attain very great popularity. This was Harrison Ainsworth, and G. P. R. James also began to publish pretty early in the third decade of the century. James' _Richelieu_, his first work of mark, appeared in 1825, the same year as _Sir John Chiverton_; but he was rather the older man of the two, having been born in 1801, while Ainsworth's birth year was 1805. The latter, too, long outlived James, who died in 1860, while holding the post of English Consul in Venice, while Ainsworth survived till 1882. Both were exceedingly prolific, James writing history and other work as well as the novels--_Darnley_, _Mary of Burgundy_, _Henry Masterton_, _John Marston Hall_, and dozens of others--which made his fame; while Ainsworth (_Jack Sheppard_, _The Tower of London_, _Crichton_, _Rookwood_, _Old St. Paul's_, etc.) was a novelist only. Both, especially between 1830 and 1850, achieved considerable popularity with