Scott, on the other hand, lived in the greatest poetical ago 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." [Abbotsford Manuscripts.

Hogg averred that nobody either read or wrote poetry after Sir Walter took to prose.] 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.