One can compute the difference between that rate and any other rate of which one may happen to have knowledge or experience; but there is no need to conclude that Scott’s rate is to be passionately desired or universally aimed at, or that, because it suited Scott, it would suit others. On the contrary, one sees some disadvantages, even in Scott’s own case, counterbalancing the advantages of such extreme rapidity. He was aware of the fact himself; and he once quotes, with some approbation, an admirable maxim of Chaucer on the subject:— “There n’ is no werkman, whatsoever he be, That may both werken well and hastily.” That Scott was an exception,—that he was, like Shakespeare, one of those workmen who _could_ work both well and hastily,—was owing doubtless to the fact that, in this also resembling Shakespeare, he brought always to the act of writing a mind already full of matter, and of the very kinds of matter required for his occasions. One has but to recollect the extraordinary range and variety of his readings from his earliest youth, the extraordinary range and variety also of his observations of men and manners, and the extraordinary retentiveness of his memory, to see that never since he had begun authorship could he have had to spin, as so many have to do, the threads of his ideas or imaginations out of a vacuum. At the same time, and this notwithstanding, there is something more to be said, when the comparison is between Scott as an exceptionally rapid worker and Shakespeare as the same. Scott had a standard of the kind of matter that would answer for the purposes of _his_ literary productions; and, though a very good standard, it was lower than Shakespeare’s standard for _his_ writings. When Shakespeare was in the act of writing, or was meditating his themes by himself in the solitude of his chamber, or in his walks over the fields, before he proceeded to the act of writing, we see his mind rolling within itself, like a great sea-wash that would rush through all the deeps and caverns, and search through all the intricacies, of its prior structure and acquisitions,—so ruled and commissioned, however, that what the reflux should fetch back for use should not be any wreckage whatsoever that might be commonly relevant and interesting, but only things of gleaming worth and rarity, presentable indeed to all, but appreciable in full only by kings and sages. Hear, on the other hand, in Scott’s own words, the definition of what satisfied _him_ in his dealings with the public. “I am sensible,” he wrote, “that, if there be anything good about my poetry, or prose either, it is a hurried frankness of composition which pleases soldiers, sailors, and young people of bold and active disposition.” That Scott was grossly unfair to himself in this under-estimate will be the verdict now of universal opinion; and I shall have to touch again upon that point presently. Meanwhile there is one