William Henry Hudson 
Sir Walter Scott 

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. It has been my aim in this volume to give a straightforward and fairly comprehensive account of the life, character, and writings of Scott; and if I have found the task a difficult one, it has hardly, I think, been more difficult than I expected when I began. Scott is altogether too big a subject to be put very successfully into a small book; his picturesque personality, the range and volume of his work, his varied relations with the men and movements of his time, and the countless delightful stories which cluster about his name, combine to fill the biographer who has but limited space at disposal with feelings akin to despair. One is so constantly tempted to enlarge, to comment, to find place for this or that familiar incident or anecdote, that the writing of almost every page represents the solution of that always taxing problem – the problem of deciding what one can best afford to leave out.