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I believe the bailiff in 'The Goodnatured Man' is not far wrong when he says: 'One man has one way of expressing himself, and another another; and that is all the difference between them.'" The difference between Scott and Thackeray or Flaubert among good writers, and a crowd of self-conscious and mannered "stylists" among writers not so very good, is essential.

About Shakspeare it was said that he "never blotted a line." The observation is almost literally true about Sir Walter.

The pages of his manuscript novels show scarcely a retouch or an erasure, whether in the "Waverley" fragment of 1805 or the unpublished "Siege of Malta" of 1832.
[A history of Scott's Manuscripts, with good fac-similes, will be found in the Catalogue of the Scott Exhibition, Edinburgh, 1872.] The handwriting becomes closer and smaller; from thirty-eight lines to the page in "Waverley," he advances to between fifty and sixty in "Ivanhoe." The few alterations are usually additions.