[** While speaking of correction, it may be noted that Scott, in his “Advertisement” prefixed to the issue of 1829, speaks of changes made in that collected edition. In “Waverley” these emendations are very rare, and are unimportant. A few _callidæ juncturæ_ are added, a very few lines are deleted. The postscript of the first edition did not contain the anecdote about the hiding-place of the manuscript among the fishing tackle. The first line of Flora Macdonald’s battle-song (chapter xxii.) originally ran, “Mist darkens the mountain, night darkens the vale,” in place of “There is mist on the mountain and mist on the vale.” For the rest, as Scott says, “where the tree falls it must lie.”] The permanence of Sir Walter’s romances is proved, as we said, by their survival among all the changes of fashion in the art of fiction. When he took up his pen to begin “Waverley,” fiction had not absorbed, as it does to-day, almost all the best imaginative energy of English or foreign writers. Now we hear of “art” on every side, and every novelist must give the world his opinion about schools and methods. Scott, on the other hand, lived in the greatest poetical age since that of Elizabeth. Poetry or the drama (in which, to be sure, few succeeded) occupied Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge, Shelley, Crabbe, Campbell, and Keats. Then, as Joanna Baillie hyperbolically declared, “The Scotch novels put poetry out of fashion.”[*] Till they appeared, novels seem to have been left to readers like the plaintive lady’s-maid whom Scott met at Dalkeith, when he beheld “the fair one descend from the carriage with three half-bound volumes of a novel in her hand.” Mr. Morritt, writing to Scott in March, 1815, hopes he will “restore pure narrative to the dignity from which it gradually slipped before it dwindled into a manufactory for the circulating library.” “Waverley,” he asserted, “would prevail over people otherwise averse to blue-backed volumes.” Thus it was an unconsidered art which Scott took up and revived. Half a century had passed since Fielding gave us in “Tom Jones” his own and very different picture of life in the “’forty-five,”—of life with all the romance of the “Race to Derby” cut down to a sentence or two. Since the age of the great English novelists, Richardson and Fielding and Miss Burney, the art of fiction had been spasmodically alive in the hands of Mrs. Radcliffe, had been sentimental with Henry Mackenzie, and now was all but moribund, save for the humorous Irish sketches of Miss Edgeworth. As Scott always insisted, it was mainly “the extended and well-merited fame of Miss Edgeworth” which induced him to try his hand on a novel containing pictures of Scottish life and character. Nothing was more remarkable in his own novels than the blending of close and humorous observation of common life with pleasure in adventurous narratives about “what is not so, and was not so, and Heaven forbid that it ever should be so,” as the girl says in the nursery tale.