Having set a fashion, he was more than once annoyed by the crowd who wrote in his style and made him feel the necessity of striking out a new line.[400] It was comparatively easy for the vigorous man who wrote _Waverley_, but in the end, when through his losses he was more than ever obliged to hit the popular taste, to feel that he must find a new style seemed a hard fate.

Yet he meant to be beforehand in the race.

This is the record in his _Journal_: "Hard pressed as I am by these imitators, who must put the thing out of fashion at last, I consider, like a fox at his last shifts, whether there be a way to dodge them--some new device to throw them off, and have a mile or two of free ground while I have legs and wind left to use it.

There is one way to give novelty: to depend for success on the interest of a well-contrived story.

But woe's me! that requires thought, consideration--the writing out a regular plan or plot--above all, the adhering to one--which I never can do, for the ideas rise as I write, and bear such a disproportioned extent to that which each occupied at the first concoction, that (cocksnowns!) I shall never be able to take the trouble; and yet to make the world stare, and gain a new march ahead of them all! Well, something we still will do."[401] By an easy extension of his principle, he came to believe that novelty would always succeed for a time.