Another of the common errors about Scott is to represent--perhaps really to regard--him as a hit-or-miss and hand-to-mouth _improvisatore_, who bundled out his creations anyhow, and did not himself know how he created them. The fallacy is worse than a fallacy: for it is down-right false witness. We have numerous passages in and out of the novels--the chief of them being the remarkable conversation with Captain Clutterbuck in the Introduction to the _Fortunes of Nigel_ and the reflections in the _Diary_ on _Sir John Chiverton_ and _Brambletye House_--showing that Scott knew perfectly well the construction and the stringing of his fiddle, as well as the trick of applying his rosin. But if we had not these direct testimonies, no one of any critical faculty could mistake the presence of consciously perceived principles in the books themselves. A man does not suddenly, and by mere blind instinct, avoid such a pitfall as that of incongruous speech and manners, which has been noticed above. It is not mere happy-go-lucky blundering which makes him invariably decline another into which people still fall--the selection of historical personages of the first importance, and elaborately known, for the _central_ figures of his novels. Not to believe in luck is a mark of perhaps greater folly than to over-believe in it: but luck will not always keep a man clear of such perils as that unskilful wedging of great blocks of mere history into his story, which the lesser historical novelists always commit, or that preponderance of mere narrative itself as compared with action and conversation from which even Dumas, even Thackeray, is not free.