The accusation of careless and slovenly style is not much better: for Scott had, perfectly, the style suited to his own work, and you cannot easily have a better style than that.

But there are two defects in him which were early detected by good and friendly judges: and which are in fact natural results of the extraordinary force and fertility of his creative power.

One--the less serious, but certainly to some extent a fault in art and a point in which he is distinguished for the worse from Shakespeare--is that he is rather given to allow at first, to some of his personages, an elaborateness and apparent emphasis of drawing which seems to promise an importance for them in the story that they never actually attain.

Mike Lambourne in _Kenilworth_ is a good example of this: but there are many others.

The fact evidently was that, in the rush of the artist's plastic imagination, other figures rose and overpowered these.