Here he built a great mansion, which
became famous as Abbotsford: he called it one of his air-castles reduced
to solid stone and mortar. Here he played the part of a feudal proprietor,
and did the honors for Scotland to distinguished men from all quarters:
his hospitality was generous and unbounded.
THE WAVERLEY NOVELS.--As early as 1805, while producing his beautiful
poems, he had tried his hand upon a story in prose, based upon the
stirring events in 1745, resulting in the fatal battle of Culloden, which
gave a death-blow to the cause of the Stuarts, and to their attempts to
regain the crown. Dissatisfied with the effort, and considering it at that
time less promising than poetry, he had thrown the manuscript aside in a
desk with some old fishing-tackle. There it remained undisturbed for eight
years. With the decline of his poetic powers, he returned to the former
notion of writing historical fiction; and so, exhuming his manuscript, he
modified and finished it, and presented it anonymously to the world in
1814.
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