As Jane Millgate, Peter T. Murphy, and John Sutherland recently have argued, the relation between popular success and artistic success in literary production – writing “for lucre … [or] for fame” – was “a subject which Scott himself could never leave completely alone.” Part of the reason for this lies with Scott's unprecedented popularity as a writer of metrical romances between 1805 and 1813. As Murphy notes, “His accomplishment remains, I think, almost unparalleled, even in our era of smash hits and giant blockbusters.” Scott's commercial success in these years made him ripe for attacks like the one above by Byron in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, and scholars such as Sutherland have attributed the anonymity of the Waverley novels at least in part to Scott's wariness of this particular kind of attack.