[Illustration: _The Canongate Tolbooth._] The great fame of Scott had been acquired by the time he began to write his _Journal_, and it rested upon a broad foundation of solid achievement. He was fifty-four years old, having been born August 15, 1771, the same year in which Smollett died. He had been an author for about thirty years,--his first publication, a translation of Bürger's _Lenore_, having appeared in 1796, the same year that was darkened by the death of Robert Burns. His social eminence also had been established. He had been sheriff of Selkirk for twenty-five years. He had been for twenty years a clerk of the Court of Session. He had been for five years a baronet, having received that rank from King George the Fourth, who always loved and admired him, in 1820. He had been for fourteen years the owner of Abbotsford, which he bought in 1811, occupied in 1812, and completed in 1824. He was yet to write _Woodstock_, the six tales called _The Chronicles of the Canongate_, _The Fair Maid of Perth_, _Anne of Geierstein_, _Count Robert of Paris_, _Castle Dangerous_, the _Life of Napoleon_, and the lovely _Stories from the History of Scotland_. All those works, together with many essays and reviews, were produced by him between 1825 and 1832, while also he was maintaining a considerable correspondence, doing his official duties, writing his _Journal_, and carrying a suddenly imposed load of debt,--which finally his herculean labours paid,--amounting to £130,000. But between 1805 and 1817 he had written _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, _Ballads and Lyrical Pieces_, _Marmion_, _The Lady of the Lake_, _The Vision of Don Roderick_, _Rokeby_, _The Lord of the Isles_, _The Field of Waterloo_, and _Harold the Dauntless_,--thus creating a great and diversified body of poetry, then in a new school and a new style, in which, although he has often been imitated, he never has been equalled. Between 1814 and 1825 he had likewise produced _Waverley_, _Guy Mannering_, _The Antiquary_, _Old Mortality_, _The Black Dwarf_, _Rob Roy_, _The Heart of Midlothian_, _A Legend of Montrose_, _The Bride of Lammermoor_, _Ivanhoe_, _The Monastery_, _The Abbot_, _Kenilworth_, _The Pirate_, _The Fortunes of Nigel_, _Peveril of the Peak_, _Quentin Durward_, _St. Ronan's Well_, _Redgauntlet_, _The Betrothed_, and _The Talisman_. This vast body of fiction was also a new creation in literature, for the English novel prior to Scott's time was the novel of manners, as chiefly represented by the works of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett. That admirable author, Miss Jane Porter, had, indeed, written the _Scottish Chiefs_ (1809), in which the note of imagination, as applied to the treatment of historical fact and character, rings true and clear; and probably that excellent book should be remembered as the beginning of English historical romance. Scott himself said that it was the parent, in his mind, of the Waverley Novels. But he surpassed it.