The price of his success in any direction was that he was unable to keep his field to himself. Having set a fashion, he was more than once annoyed by the crowd who wrote in his style and made him feel the necessity of striking out a new line.[400] It was comparatively easy for the vigorous man who wrote _Waverley_, but in the end, when through his losses he was more than ever obliged to hit the popular taste, to feel that he must find a new style seemed a hard fate. Yet he meant to be beforehand in the race. This is the record in his _Journal_: "Hard pressed as I am by these imitators, who must put the thing out of fashion at last, I consider, like a fox at his last shifts, whether there be a way to dodge them--some new device to throw them off, and have a mile or two of free ground while I have legs and wind left to use it. There is one way to give novelty: to depend for success on the interest of a well-contrived story. But woe's me! that requires thought, consideration--the writing out a regular plan or plot--above all, the adhering to one--which I never can 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; and yet to make the world stare, and gain a new march ahead of them all! Well, something we still will do."[401] By an easy extension of his principle, he came to believe that novelty would always succeed for a time. The opinion is expressed often in his reviews, and in his journal and letters is applied to his own work. So it was that when any one of his books seemed partially to fail with the public, his immediate impulse was to look for something new to be done.[402] One of his schemes was a work on popular superstitions, projected when _Quentin Durward_ seemed to be falling flat; but the success of the novel made the immediate execution of the plan unnecessary.[403] It was largely his desire to secure variety that encouraged him to undertake historical writing. He had also a theory about how history should be written, and so he felt that the novelty would consist in something more than the fact that the Author of Waverley had taken a new line. He wished, as Thackeray did later when he proposed to write a history of the Age of Queen Anne, to use in an avowedly serious book the material with which he had stored his imagination; and he believed he could present it with a vivacity that was not characteristic of professional historians. The success of the first series of _Tales of a Grandfather_ served to confirm the opinion he had expressed about them,--"I care not who knows it, I think well of them. Nay, I will hash history with anybody, be he who he will."[404]