e know
that in his early days he was much interested in translating
contemporary German plays. His version of Goethe's _Goetz von
Berlichingen_ was the most important of these translations. A letter of
Scott's contains the following reference to this play:[140] "The
publication of Goetz was a great era ... in German literature, and
served completely to free them from the French follies of unities and
decencies of the scene, and gave an impulse to their dramas which was
unique of its kind. Since that, they have been often stark mad but
never, I think, stupid. They either divert you by taking the most
brilliant leaps through the hoop, or else by tumbling into the custard,
as the newspapers averred the Champion did at the Lord Mayor's dinner."

When he is on English ground we can best trace Scott's individual
opinions, yet even here he reflects some of the limitations of the less
enlightened scholarship of his time, especially in connection with early
Elizabethan writers. He passes from _Ferrex and Porrex_[141] and _Gammer
Gurton's Needle_ directly to Shakspere, and quite omits Marlowe and the
other immediate predecessors. He was not ignorant of their existence,
for against a statement of Dryden's that Shakspere was the first to use
blank verse we find in Scott's edition the note,--"This is a mistake.
Marlowe and several other dramatic authors used blank verse before the
days of Shakespeare";[142] and one of his youthful notebooks contains
this comment on _Faustus_: "A very remarkable thing. Grand subject--end
grand."[143] In 1831 Scott intended to write an article for the
_Quarterly Review_ on Peele, Greene, and Webster, and in asking
Alexander Dyce to have Webster's works sent to him he said, "Marlowe and
others I have,--and some acquaintance with the subject, though not
much."[144] Webster he considered "one of the best of our ancient
dramatists." The proposed article was never written, because of Scott's
final illness.

In spite of his statement that "the English stage might be considered
equally without rule and without model when Shakspeare arose," Scott did
not seem inclined to leave the great man altogether unaccounted for, as
some critics have preferred to do, for he says, "The effect of the
genius of an individual upon the taste of a nation is mighty; but that
genius in its turn is formed according to the opinions prevalent at the
period when it comes into existence." These opinions, however, Scott
assigns very