# Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron/Conversations/Section 35

​When I entered the room, Lord Byron was devouring, as he called it, a new novel of Sir Walter Scott’s.
“How difficult it is,” said he, “to say any thing new! Who was that voluptuary of antiquity, who offered a reward for a new pleasure? Perhaps all nature and art could not supply a new idea.
“This page, for instance, is a brilliant one; it is full of wit. But let us see how much of it is original. This passage, for instance, comes from Shakspeare; this bon mot from one of Sheridan’s Comedies; this observation from another writer (naming the author); and yet the ideas are new-moulded,—and perhaps Scott was not aware of their being plagiarisms. It is a bad thing to have too good a memory.”
“I should not like to have you for a critic,” I observed.
“‘Set a thief to catch a thief,’” was the reply.
“I never travel without Scott’s Novels,” said he: “they are a library in themselves—a perfect literary treasure. I could read them once a-year with new pleasure.”
​I asked him if he was certain about the Novels being Sir Walter Scott’s?
“Scott as much as owned himself the author of ‘Waverley’ to me in Murray’s shop,” replied he. “I was talking to him about that novel, and lamented that its author had not carried back the story nearer to the time of the Revolution. Scott, entirely off his guard, said, ‘Ay, I might have done so, but’——There he stopped. It was in vain to attempt to correct himself: he looked confused, and relieved his embarrassment by a precipitate retreat.
“On another occasion I was to dine at Murray’s; and being in his parlour in the morning, he told me I should meet the author of ‘Waverley’ at dinner. He had received several excuses, and the party was a small one; and, knowing all the people present, I was satisfied that the writer of that novel must have been, and could have been, no other than Walter Scott.
“He spoiled the fame of his poetry by his superior prose. He has such extent and versatility of powers in writing, that, should his Novels ever tire the public, which is not likely, he will apply himself to something else, and succeed as well.
​“His mottoes from old plays prove that he, at all events, possesses the dramatic faculty, which is denied me. And yet I am told that his ‘Halidon Hill’ did not justify expectation. I have never met with it, but have seen extracts from it.”
“Do you think,” asked I, “that Sir Walter Scott’s Novels owe any part of their reputation to the concealment of the author’s name?”
“No,” said he; “such works do not gain or lose by it. I am at a loss to know his reason for keeping up the incognito,—but that the reigning family could not have been very well pleased with ‘Waverley.’ There is a degree of charlatanism in some authors keeping up the Unknown. Junius owed much of his fame to that trick; and now that it is known to be the work of Sir Philip Francis, who reads it? A political writer, and one who descends to personalities such as disgrace Junius, should be immaculate as a public, as well as a private character; and Sir Philip Francis was neither. He had his price, and was gagged by being sent to India. He there seduced another man’s wife. It would have been a new case for a Judge to sit in judgment ​on himself, in a Crim.-con. It seems that his conjugal felicity was not great, for, when his wife died, he came into the room where they were sitting up with the corpse, and said ‘Solder her up, solder her up!’ He saw his daughter crying, and scolded her, saying, ‘An old hag—she ought to have died thirty years ago! He married, shortly after, a young woman. He hated Hastings to a violent degree; all he hoped and prayed for was to outlive him.—But many of the newspapers of the day are written as well as Junius. Matthias’s book, ‘The Pursuits of Literature,’ now almost a dead-letter, had once a great fame.
“When Walter Scott began to write poetry, which was not at a very early age, Monk Lewis corrected his verse: he understood little then of the mechanical part of the art. The Fire King in ‘The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border,’ was almost all Lewis’s. One of the ballads in that work, and, except some of Leyden’s, perhaps one of the best, was made from a story picked up in a stage-coach;—I mean that of ‘Will Jones.’
‘They boil’d Will Jones within the pot, And not much fat had Will.’
​“I hope Walter Scott did not write the review on ‘Christabel;’ for he certainly, in common with many of us, is indebted to Coleridge. But for him, perhaps, ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel’ would never have been thought of. The line
‘Jesu Maria shield thee well!’
is word for word from ‘Christabel.’
“Of all the writers of the day, Walter Scott is the least jealous: he is too confident of his own fame to dread the rivalry of others. He does not think of good writing, as the Tuscans do of fever,—that there is only a certain quantity of it in the world.”