[Guy Mannering or The Astrologer Complete by Sir Walter Scott]@TWC D-Link bookGuy Mannering or The Astrologer Complete INTRODUCTION 34/64
The writer is apt to become self-conscious, to remember the advice of his critics,--a fatal error,--and to tremble before the shadow of his own success.
He knows that he will have many enemies, that hundreds of people will be ready to find fault and to vow that he is "written out." Scott was not unacquainted with these apprehensions.
After publishing "Marmion" he wrote thus to Lady Abercorn:-- "No one acquires a certain degree of popularity without exciting an equal degree of malevolence among those who, either from rivalship or from the mere wish to pull down what others have set up, are always ready to catch the first occasion to lower the favoured individual to what they call his 'real standard.' Of this I have enough of experience, and my political interferences, however useless to my friends, have not failed to make me more than the usual number of enemies.
I am therefore bound, in justice to myself and to those whose good opinion has hitherto protected me, not to peril myself too frequently.
The naturalists tell us that if you destroy the web which the spider has just made, the insect must spend many days in inactivity till he has assembled within his person the materials necessary to weave another.
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