In 1812 he bought the farm at Abbotsford, to the ownership of which he had long looked forward. The country was lovely, the four acres grew into a great estate, the farm cottage became a stately mansion, as all traveled Americans know, and the owner lived like a Scotch laird but without a laird's steady income. He entertained lavishly and lived in feudal state, happy in his friends, his tenants, his horses and dogs. But the land alone cost more than a hundred and fifty thousand dollars! [Illustration: A GLIMPSE OF ABBOTSFORD] In 1805 Scott was the most popular poet in Great Britain. He had opened a fresh field, he had command of the magic of romance which always has and always will, in spite of temporary changes of taste, cast a spell over the imagination of men; his style was simple and his method plain; all classes of readers could understand him. During the next ten years he published six or seven long poems of varying merit. When the last of these, "The Lord of the Isles," appeared in 1815, the popular interest had diminished in volume and intensity, and the poet was in serious financial difficulties as the result of his lavish scale of living and the mismanagement of his business enterprises. The Waverley Novels At the moment when ruin faced him he found himself suddenly in the possession of a great income from an unexpected source. In 1805 he had written, almost at a sitting, an instalment of a story of the uprising of 1745 in a futile attempt to restore the exiled Stuart, Charles Edward, to the throne. In 1814 he completed the story and published it anonymously under the title of "Waverley." The novel was written in what the oarsmen call a "spurt"; not because the novelist was writing carelessly at breakneck speed for immediate income, but because he was a tremendous worker and more concerned with the general movement and human interest of the story in hand than with the details of its workmanship. To immense energy of mind and body Scott united patience and methodical habits of work, as he added to a romantic imagination keen interest in the business of life and in the smallest detail of practical affairs. His appetite for facts was as marked as his capacity for sentiment. Scott had breadth and vigor rather than delicacy of imagination; that is one reason why he is out of fashion at a time when men want to know not only what people do but why and how they do it. He saw men and events in the rough; he was interested in striking historical incidents and events, in strongly-marked characters, in actions rather than in moods. In a word, Scott was a writer who took the world as he found it, and described it as he saw it, without any strong desire to reform it. He was a Tory in politics, a strong adherent of an ordered society; a good, sound man not haunted by misgiving and questioning about the general order of things.