Scott knew very well the disadvantages of improvisation, of piling up his interest and our own together. But he could work in no other manner. He said: 'There is one way to give novelty, to depend for success on the interest of a well contrived story. But, wo's me! that requires thought, consideration--the writing out of a regular plan or plot--above all, the adhering to one, which I can never 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.' His was a mind entirely different from Poe's, or Mérimée's, or Flaubert's, those scrupulous technicians with whom was the future of Romanticism, and it was an artistic virtue in him to realise the fact, to proceed on his own course, leaving as he went large, rough, incomparable things, as impressive as the boulder stones of which the country people say that a giant threw them as he passed. [His character and work.] His swift, confused writing gets its effect because he never asked too much from it. He never tried to do anything with it beyond the description of his characters and the telling of their story. He had no need to catch an atmosphere by subtleties of language. His conception of the beings and life of another age did not make them different except in externals, from our own. He did not, like Gautier or Flaubert, regard the past as a miraculous time in which it was possible to be oneself, or in which true feeling was not veiled in inexactitudes. Very simple himself, he did not feel in the present those laxities of sensation or inexactitudes of expression that made the past a place of refuge. He was not dissatisfied with life as he found it, and was not disposed to alter it when he dressed it for a masquerade. Nor was that difficult for him. His mind was full of the stage properties of the past, and, as he walked about, he lived in any time he chose and was the same in all of them. He lived with humanity rather than in any particular half-century, and did not feel, like Peacock, the need of dainty, careful movement in order not to break the fabric he was building. _Maid Marian_ is the same story as _Ivanhoe_. Scott seems to have stepped straight out of his story to write it, Peacock to be looking a long way back, and building very skilfully the replica of something he had never seen but in a peculiarly happy vision. Scott is quite at home in his tale, and can treat it as rudely as he likes. Peacock seems to be playing very warily on the fragile keys of a spinet.