Another and perhaps a deeper impulse to the composition of those novels was the consciousness, when Lord Byron, by the publication of _Childe Harold_ (the first and second cantos, in 1812), suddenly checked or eclipsed his immediate popularity as a poet, that it would be necessary for him to strike out a new path. He had begun _Waverley_ in 1805 and thrown the fragment aside. He took it up again in 1814, wrought upon it for three weeks and finished it, and so began the career of "the Great Unknown." The history of literature presents scarce a comparable example of such splendid industry sustained upon such a high level of endeavour, animated by such glorious genius, and resultant in such a noble and beneficent fruition. The life of Balzac, whom his example inspired, and who may be accounted the greatest of French writers since Voltaire, is perhaps the only life that drifts suggestively into the scholar's memory, as he thinks of the prodigious labours of Sir Walter Scott. During the days of his prosperity Scott maintained his manor at Abbotsford and his town-house in Edinburgh, and he frequently migrated from one to the other, dispensing a liberal hospitality at both. He was not one of those authors who think that there is nothing in the world but pen and ink. He esteemed living to be more important than writing about it, and the development of the soul to be a grander result than the production of a book. "I hate an author that's all author," said Byron; and in this virtuous sentiment Scott participated. His character and conduct, his unaffected modesty as to his own works, his desire to found a great house and to maintain a stately rank among the land-owners of his country, and as a son of chivalry, have, for this reason, been greatly misunderstood by dull people. They never, indeed, would have found the least fault with him if he had not become a bankrupt; for the mouth of every dunce is stopped by practical success. When he got into debt, though, it was discovered that he ought to have had a higher ambition than the wish to maintain a place among the landed gentry of Scotland; and even though he ultimately paid his debts,--literally working himself to death to do it,--he was not forgiven by that class of censors; and to some extent their chatter of paltry disparagement still survives. While he was rich, however, his halls were thronged with fashion, rank, and renown. Edinburgh, still the stateliest city on which the sun looks down, must have been, in the last days of George the Third, a place of peculiar beauty, opulence, and social brilliancy. Scott, whose father was a Writer to the Signet, and who derived his descent from a good old Border family, the Scotts of Harden, had, from his youth, been accustomed to refined society and elegant surroundings. He was born and reared a gentleman, and a gentleman he never ceased to be. His father's house was No. 25 George Square, then an aristocratic quarter, now somewhat fallen