It is an excuse: but it is hardly a justification.

The other and more serious is a tendency--which grew on him and may no doubt have been encouraged by the astonishing pecuniary rewards of his work--to hurry his conclusions, to "huddle up the cards and throw them into the bag," as Lady Louisa Stuart told him.

There is one of the numerous, but it would seem generic and classifiable, forms of unpleasant dream in which the dreamer's watch, to his consternation, suddenly begins to send its hands round at double and ten-fold speed.

Scott is rather apt to do this, towards the close of his novels, in his eagerness to begin something else.

These defects, however, are defects much more from the point of view of abstract criticism than from that of the pleasure of the reader: while, even from the former, they are outweighed many times by merits.