Thus, few, I suppose, would hesitate to say that while _Old Mortality_ is very near, if not quite, the finest of Scott's works, _The Black Dwarf_ is not far from the other end of the scale.

Yet the two were written in immediate succession (_The Black Dwarf_ being the first of the two), and were published together, as the first series of _Tales of my Landlord_, in 1816.

Nor do I think that any competent critic would find any clear deterioration of quality in the novels of the later years,--excepting of course the two written after the stroke of paralysis.

It is true, of course, that some of the subjects which most powerfully stirred his imagination were among his earlier themes, and that he could not effectually use the same subject twice, though he now and then tried it.

But making allowance for this consideration, the imaginative power of the novels is as astonishingly _even_ as the rate of composition itself.