And _The Lady of the Lake_ is all that the Highlands meant for Scott at that time. But _Rokeby_ has little substance, though it includes more than one of Scott's finest songs. _The Lord of the Isles_, though its battle is not too far below _Marmion_, and though its hero is Robert the Bruce, yet wants the original force of the earlier romances. When Scott changed his hand from verse to prose for story-telling and wrote _Waverley_, he not only gained in freedom and got room for a kind of dialogue that was impossible in rhyme, but he came back to the same sort of experience and the same strength of tradition as had given life to the _Lay_. The time of _Waverley_ was no more than sixty years since, when Scott began to write it and mislaid and forgot the opening chapters in 1805; he got his ideas of the Forty-five from an old Highland gentleman who had been out with the Highland clans, following the lead of Prince Charles Edward, the Young Chevalier. The clans in that adventure belonged to a world more ancient than that of _Ivanhoe_ or _The Talisman_; they also belonged so nearly to Scott's own time that he heard their story from one of themselves. He had spoken and listened to another gentleman who had known Rob Roy. _The Bride of Lammermoor_ came to him as the Icelandic family histories came to the historians of Gunnar or Kjartan Olafsson. He had known the story all his life, and he wrote it from tradition. The time of _The Heart of Midlothian_ is earlier than _Waverley_, but it is more of a modern novel than an historical romance, and even _Old Mortality_, which is earlier still, is modern also; Cuddie Headrigg is no more antique than Dandie Dinmont or the Ettrick Shepherd himself, and even his mother and her Covenanting friends are not far from the fashion of some enthusiasts of Scott's own time--e.g. Hogg's religious uncle who could not be brought to repeat his old ballads for thinking of 'covenants broken, burned and buried.' _Guy Mannering_ and _The Antiquary_ are both modern stories: it is not till _Ivanhoe_ that Scott definitely starts on the regular historical novel in the manner that was found so easy to imitate.