, and still it goes on unwearied;
and so it will be till candles are brought in, and God knows
how long after that. It is the same every night--I can't
stand a sight of it when I am not at my books.' 'Some
stupid, dogged engrossing clerk, probably,' exclaimed
myself, 'or some other giddy youth in our society.' 'No,
boys,' said our host; 'I well know what hand it is--'tis
Walter Scott's.'"[32]
If that is not extempore writing, it is difficult to say what
extempore writing is. But in truth, there is no evidence that any one
of the novels was laboured, or even so much as carefully composed.
Scott's method of composition was always the same; and, when writing
an imaginative work, the rate of progress seems to have been pretty
even, depending much more on the absence of disturbing engagements,
than on any mental irregularity. The morning was always his brightest
time; but morning or evening, in country or in town, well or ill,
writing with his own pen or dictating to an amanuensis in the
intervals of screaming-fits due to the torture of cramp in the
stomach, Scott spun away at his imaginative web almost as evenly as a
silkworm spins at its golden cocoon.
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