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."] As long as he was understood, he was almost reckless of well-constructed sentences, of the one best word for his meaning, of rounded periods.

This indifference is not to be praised, but it is only a proof of his greatness that his style, never distinguished, and often lax, has not impaired the vitality of his prose.

The heart which beats in his works, the knowledge of human nature, the dramatic vigour of his character, the nobility of his whole being win the day against the looseness of his manner, the negligence of his composition, against the haste of fatigue which set him, as Lady Louisa Stuart often told him, on "huddling up a conclusion anyhow, and so kicking the book out of his way." In this matter of denouements he certainly was no more careful than Shakspeare or Moliere.
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.