For the Antiquary's immortal sorrow Scott had a model in his own experience.

"What a romance to tell!--and told, I fear, it will one day be.

And then my three years of dreaming and my two years of wakening will be chronicled doubtless.
But the dead will feel no pain." The dead, as Aristotle says, if they care for such things at all, care no more than we do for what has passed in a dream.
The general sketch probably began to take full shape about the last day of 1815.

On December 29 Scott wrote to Ballantyne:-- DEAR JAMES,-- I've done, thank'God, with the long yarns Of the most prosy of Apostles--Paul, 1 And now advance, sweet heathen of Monkbarns, Step out, old quizz, as fast as I can scrawl.
In "The Antiquary" Scott had a subject thoroughly to his mind.

He had been an antiquary from his childhood.