PREFATORY NOTE.


It will be observed that the greater part of this little book has been
taken in one form or other from Lockhart's _Life of Sir Walter Scott_,
in ten volumes. No introduction to Scott would be worth much in which
that course was not followed. Indeed, excepting Sir Walter's own
writings, there is hardly any other great source of information about
him; and that is so full, that hardly anything needful to illustrate
the subject of Scott's life remains untouched. As regards the only
matters of controversy,--Scott's relations to the Ballantynes, I have
taken care to check Mr. Lockhart's statements by reading those of the
representatives of the Ballantyne brothers; but with this exception,
Sir Walter's own works and Lockhart's life of him are the great
authorities concerning his character and his story.

Just ten years ago Mr. Gladstone, in expressing to the late Mr. Hope
Scott the great delight which the perusal of Lockhart's life of Sir
Walter had given him, wrote, "I may be wrong, but I am vaguely under
the impression that it has never had a really wide circulation. If so,
it is the saddest pity, and I should greatly like (without any censure
on its present length) to see published an abbreviation of it." Mr.
Gladstone did not then know that as long ago as 1848 Mr. Lockhart did
himself prepare such an abbreviation, in which the original
eighty-four chapters were compressed into eighteen,--though the
abbreviation contained additions as well as compressions. But even
this abridgment is itself a bulky volume of 800 pages, containing, I
should think, considerably more than a third of the reading in the
original ten volumes, and is not, therefore, very likely to be
preferred to the completer work. In some respects I hope that this