SIR WALTER SCOTT’S literary biographies are not in the strictest sense essays. They are narratives rather than essays, but they belong to the literature of the English essay cycle and deserve to be studied as part of it. His incomparable gifts as a novelist were developed through a method which is incompatible with high excellence in essay writing. He was the greatest romance writer of his century and he became so because his mind expressed itself through the construction of romantic plots as naturally as Addison and Lamb expressed theirs through monologue, characterized by that kaleidoscopic shifting of topics which is the charm of the essay and the despair of the novel. Even when he is at his best as an essayist. Sir Walter is still the great novelist, with the virtue of the novelist rather than of the essayist. But the narrative style he loves rather enhances than detracts from the interest of his essays. Whatever he lacks in attention to the art of construction, he more than makes good by crowding incident on incident and anecdote on anecdote, until we forget to regret the loss of the great essayist he might have become had he not been the incomparable story-teller he is.