"Mandeville" came out about the same time as "Rob Roy;" but the "craziness of the public" for the Author of "Waverley" was not changed into a passion for the father-in-law of Shelley.
"'The Antiquary,' after a little pause of hesitation, attained popularity not inferior to 'Guy Mannering,' and though the author appears for a moment to have shared the doubts which he read in the countenance of James Ballantyne, it certainly was, in the sequel, his chief favourite among all his novels.'" As Scott said to Terry, "If a man will paint from nature, he will be likely to amuse those who are daily looking at it." The years which saw the first appearance of "Guy Mannering" also witnessed that of "Emma." By the singular chance, or law, which links great authors closely in time, giving us novelists in pairs, Miss Austen was "drawing from nature" at the very moment when Scott was wedding nature with romance.
How generously and wisely he admired her is familiar, and it may, to some, seem curious that he never deliberately set himself to a picture of ordinary life, free from the intrusion of the unusual, of the heroic.
Once, looking down at the village which lies on the Tweed, opposite Melrose, he remarked that under its roofs tragedies and tales were doubtless being lived.

'I undertake to say there is some real romance at this moment going on down there, that, if it could have justice done to it, would be well worth all the fiction that was ever spun out of human brains.' But the example he gave was terrible,--"anything more dreadful was never conceived by Crabbe;" yet, adds Lockhart, "it would never have entered into his head to elaborate such a tale." He could not dwell in the unbroken gloom dear to some modern malingerers.

But he could easily have made a tale of common Scotch life, dark with the sorrow of Mucklebackit, and bright with the mirth of Cuddie Headrigg.

There was, however, this difficulty,--that Scott cared not to write a story of a single class.

"From the peer to the ploughman," all society mingles in each of his novels.