Sir Walter Scott Author:Andrew Lang Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III QUARTERLY REVIEW, LADY OF THE LAKE, ROKEBY, BALLANTYNE AFFAIRS As Scott had now become a professional man of letters, while remaining a w... more »ell paid official, it may be convenient to glance at the state of the literary calling in 1808. Britain was not yet a wildly excitable and hysterical country. Rapidity of communication of news had not irritated the nerves of the community. We won or lost a battle, but as men knew nothing about it till long after the event, as they did not sit with their eyes on a tape, as there were not fresh editions of the evening newspaper every quarter of an hour, they could be engaged in war without wholly abandoning the study and purchase of books. A few years after Scott's death, a Parliamentary Commission inquired into the financial conditions of publishers and authors. The Commission learned, from one of Messrs. Longmans' firm, that it was not unusual forgentlemen to "form libraries" (the expression "every gentleman's library" survives as a jest), but that the practice began to decline in 1814, and had now ceased to be. The man who killed the formation of private libraries was Walter Scott. His Waverley appeared in 1814, and henceforth few people purchased any books except novels. Poetry soon became a " drug in the market," and the taste for " the classics," whether ancient or modern, died away: the novel was everything, and presently novels were procured from the circulating library. It was the fortune of Scott to take full advantage of the traditional usage of " forming libraries " in the years between the appearance of the Lay and of Waverley. He edited Dryden in many volumes, and was fairly well paid. By doubling the price, Constable induced him to edit Swift's works, and to write the best extant Life of Swift. He also e...« less