Scott seemed to think it was mere wilfulness that prevented a man of such gifts as Campbell's from writing abundantly.
The corresponding disadvantages of rapid composition were of course evident to him.

From the first appearance of the _Lay_ to the end of his career he lamented his inability to plan a story in an orderly manner and follow out the scheme; he admitted also that "the misfortune of writing fast is that one cannot at the same time write concisely."[352] Of _Marmion_ he told Southey, "I had not time to write the poem shorter."[353] His grief on these points seems qualified, however, by a conviction that he could not write with deliberation and method and still produce the effect of vivacious spontaneity.

He thought Fielding was almost the only novelist who had thoroughly succeeded in combining these various admirable qualities,[354] and he said in this connection, "To demand equal correctness and felicity in those who may follow in the track of that illustrious novelist, would be to fetter too much the power of giving pleasure, by surrounding it with penal rules; since of this sort of light literature it may be especially said--_tout genre est permis, hors le genre ennuyeux_."[355] "To confess to you the truth," says the "Author" in the Introductory Epistle to _Nigel_, "the works and passages in which I have succeeded, have uniformly been written with the greatest rapidity; and when I have seen some of these placed in opposition with others, and commended as more highly finished, I could appeal to pen and standish, that the parts in which I have come feebly off were by much the more laboured." He attempted to write _Rokeby_ with great care, but threw the first version into the fire because he concluded that he had "corrected the spirit out of it, as a lively pupil is sometimes flogged into a dunce by a severe schoolmaster."[356] He was better satisfied with the result when he resumed his pen in his "old Cossack manner."[357] Similarly he writes of John Home's tragedy, _Douglas_, that the finest scene was, "we learn with pleasure but without surprise," unchanged from the first draft;[358] and elsewhere he speaks of the greater chance for popularity of the "bold, decisive, but light-touched strain of poetry or narrative in literary composition," over the "more highly-wrought performance."[359] A good exposition of Scott's real opinion in regard to his own style is to be found in his review of _Tales of My Landlord_.

Some parts of the article were probably inserted by his friend William Erskine, but the section I quote bears unmistakable evidence that it was written by the author himself, for it expresses that combined reprobation and approval of his style which is amusingly characteristic of him.

He says: "Our author has told us that it was his object to present a series of scenes and characters connected with Scotland in its past and present state, and we must own that his stories are so slightly constructed as to remind us of the showman's thread with which he draws up his pictures and presents them successively to the eye of the spectator....