Scott's novels were literally poured out during fifteen wonderful years; and even then the broken man could still apply the whip to his exhausted and crippled brain. The popular success of the novels was unprecedented in the history of literature. It is estimated that Scott earned with his pen not less than three-quarters of a million dollars. The earlier stories were the best: "The Antiquary," "Old Mortality," "Rob Roy," "Heart of Midlothian," "Guy Mannering." These were followed by the series of semi-historical novels with their brilliant historical portraits: "Ivanhoe," the most popular though by no means the best of Scott's stories, "The Monastery," "The Abbot," "Kenilworth," "Quentin Durward," "The Bride of Lammermoor," "The Talisman." [Illustration: THE EMPTY CHAIR, ABBOTSFORD From the painting by Sir W. Allan, R. A., in the Royal Collection] The defects of these novels and those which came later have been clearly pointed out since the analytical novel and the novel of purpose have come into vogue. Scott did not command the constructive skill of even the second-rate novelist of today; he was often an awkward builder and clumsy in putting his materials together in a coherent whole; his style is often loose and diffuse; he dealt largely with the outside of the spectacle of living; his women have no magic of loveliness, no mystery of temperament, though they sometimes stand out with great distinctness; his heroes are rarely heroic, they are often commonplace. Scott was the chronicler of feudalism, the primitive social order of the clan, of an aristocratic society. He was as little interested in Democracy as was Shakespeare; and largely for the same reason: his age was not anti-democratic, it had not reached the democratic stage. Bagehot, the famous English critic, put his limitations under two heads: he gives us the stir of the world but not its soul, and he leaves the abstract intellect unreported. His vital interest in the moving spectacle of life has given us an almost unrivalled report of that world, and of a great group of men and women whose careers, as Scott reports them, have the reality of fact and the dramatic interest of fiction. Jeanie Deans, Madge Wildfire, Diana Vernon, Meg Merrilies, Wandering Willie, Andrew Fairservice, and a crowd of their companions, are more alive today, after a century has passed, than most of the people whose names are in the telephone directories.