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.

Through his whole life he remained the dreamer of dreams and teller of wild legends, who had held the lads of the High School entranced round Luckie Brown's fireside, and had fleeted the summer days in interchange of romances with a schoolboy friend, Mr.Irving, among the hills that girdle Edinburgh.

He ever had a passion for "knights and ladies and dragons and giants," and "God only knows," he says, "how delighted I was to find myself in such society." But with all this delight, his imagination had other pleasures than the fantastic: the humours and passions of ordinary existence were as clearly visible to him as the battles, the castles, and the giants.