But making allowance for this
consideration, the imaginative power of the novels is as astonishingly
_even_ as the rate of composition itself. For my own part, I greatly
prefer _The Fortunes of Nigel_ (which was written in 1822) to
_Waverley_ which was begun in 1805, and finished in 1814, and though
very many better critics would probably decidedly disagree, I do not
think that any of them would consider this preference grotesque or
purely capricious. Indeed, though _Anne of Geierstein_,--the last
composed before Scott's stroke,--would hardly seem to any careful
judge the equal of _Waverley_, I do not much doubt that if it had
appeared in place of _Waverley_, it would have excited very nearly as
much interest and admiration; nor that had _Waverley_ appeared in
1829, in place of _Anne of Geierstein_, it would have failed to excite
very much more. In these fourteen most effective years of Scott's
literary life, during which he wrote twenty-three novels besides
shorter tales, the best stories appear to have been on the whole the
most rapidly written, probably because they took the strongest hold of
the author's imagination.
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