Note 4 — LETTER XXXII.

The great period of mid-life is again divided exactly in the midst by the change of temper which made him accurate instead of fantastic in delineation, and therefore habitually write in prose rather than verse. The ‘Lady of the Lake’ is his last poem, (1810). ‘Rokeby,’ (1812) is a versified novel; the ‘Lord of the Isles’ is not so much. The steady legal and historical work of 1810–1814, issuing in the ‘Essay on Scottish Judicature,’ and the ‘Life of Swift,’ with preparation for his long-cherished purpose of an edition and ‘Life of Pope,’4 (“the true deacon of the craft,” as Scott often called him,) confirmed, while they restrained and chastised, his imaginative power; and ‘Waverley,’ (begun in 1805) was completed in 1814. The apparently unproductive year of accurate study, 1811, divides the thirty years of mid-life in the precise centre, giving fifteen to song, and fifteen to history.