Scott was attracted by the romantic side of German literature. His first published poem was a translation made in 1796 from Bürger's wild ballad, _Leonora_. He followed this up with versions of the same poet's _Wilde Jäger_, of Goethe's violent drama of feudal life, _Götz Von Berlichingen_, and with other translations from the German, of a similar class. On his horseback trips through the border, where he studied the primitive manners of the Liddesdale people, and took down old ballads from the recitation of ancient dames and cottagers, he amassed the materials for his _Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border_, 1802. But the first of his original poems was the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_, published in 1805, and followed, in quick sucession by _Marmion_, the _Lady of the Lake_, _Rokeby_, the _Lord of the Isles_, and a volume of ballads and lyrical pieces, all issued during the years 1806-1814. The popularity won by this series of metrical romances was immediate and wide-spread. Nothing so fresh or so brilliant had appeared in English poetry for nearly two centuries. The reader was hurried along through scenes of rapid action, whose effect was heightened by wild landscapes and picturesque manners. The pleasure was a passive one. There was no deep thinking to perplex, no subtler beauties to pause upon; the feelings were stirred pleasantly, but not deeply; the effect was on the surface. The spell employed was novelty--or, at most, wonder--and the chief emotion aroused was breathless interest in the progress of the story. Carlyle said that Scott's genius was _in extenso_, rather than _in intenso_, and that its great praise was its healthiness. This is true of his verse, but not altogether so of his prose, which exhibits deeper qualities. Some of Scott's most perfect poems, too, are his shorter ballads, like _Jock o' Hazeldean_, and _Proud Maisie is in the Wood_, which have a greater intensity and compression than his metrical tales.
From 1814 to 1831 Scott wrote and published the _Waverley_ novels, some thirty in number; if we consider the amount of work done, the speed with which it was done, and the general average of excellence maintained, perhaps the most marvelous literary feat on record. The series was issued anonymously, and takes its name from the first number: _Waverley, or 'Tis Sixty Years Since_. This was founded upon the rising of the clans, in 1745, in support of the Young Pretender, Charles Edward Stuart, and it revealed to the English public that almost foreign country which lay just across their threshold, the Scottish Highlands. The _Waverley_ novels remain, as a whole, unequaled as historical fiction, although here and there a single novel, like George Eliot's _Romola_, or Thackeray's _Henry Esmond_, or Kingsley's _Hypatia_, may have attained a place beside the best of them. They were a novelty when they appeared. English prose fiction had somewhat declined since the time of Fielding and Goldsmith. There were truthful, though rather tame, delineations of provincial life, like Jane Austen's _Sense and Sensibility_, 1811, and _Pride and Prejudice_, 1813; or Maria Edgeworth's _Popular Tales_, 1804. On the other hand, there were Gothic romances, like the _Monk_ of Matthew Gregory Lewis, to whose _Tales of Wonder_ some of Scott's translations from the German had been contributed; or like Anne Radcliffe's _Mysteries of Udolpho_. The great original of this school of fiction was Horace Walpole's _Castle of Otranto_, 1765; an absurd tale of secret trap-doors, subterranean vaults, apparitions of monstrous mailed figures and colossal helmets, pictures that descend from their frames, and hollow voices that proclaim the ruin of ancient families.