which helped Jeffrey
successfully to take the attitude of the censor, and which made his
satire triumphant among his contemporaries. Scott declined, moreover, to
cultivate skill in a method which he considered unfair. Compared with
Jeffrey's his criticism wanted incisiveness, but it wears better.

The period was transitional, and Jeffrey did not go so far as Scott in
breaking away from the dictation of his predecessors. But his attitude
was on the whole more modern than the reader would infer from the
following sentence in one of his earliest reviews: "Poetry has this much
at least in common with religion, that its standards were fixed long ago
by certain inspired writers, whose authority it is no longer lawful to
call in question."[461] He considered himself rather an interpreter of
public opinion than a judge defining ancient legislation, but he used
the opinion of himself and like-minded men as an unimpeachable test of
what the greater public ought to believe in regard to literature. We may
remember that the enthusiasm over the Elizabethan dramatists which seems
a special property of Lamb and Hazlitt, and which Scott shared, was
characteristic also of Jeffrey himself. It was Jeffrey's dogmatism and
his repugnance to certain fundamental ideas which were to become
dominant in the poetry of the nineteenth century that lead us to
consider him one of the last representatives of the eighteenth century
critical tradition. Scott praised the Augustan writers as warmly as
Jeffrey did, but he was more hospitable to the newer literary impulse.
"Perhaps the most damaging accusation that can be made against Jeffrey
as a critic," says Mr. Gates, "is inability to read and interpret the
age in which he lived."[462]

Scott's criticism was largely appreciative, but appreciative on a
somewhat different plane from that of the contemporary critics whom we
are accustomed to place in a more modern school: Hazlitt, Hunt, Lamb,
and Coleridge. His judgments were less delicate and subtle than the
judgments of these men were apt to be, and more "reasonable" in the
eighteenth-century sense; they were marked, however, by a regard for the
imagination that would have seemed most unreasonable to many men of the
eighteenth century.

Scott had not a fixed theory of literature which could dominate his mind
when he approached any work. He was open-minded, and in spite of his
extreme fondness for the poetry of Dr. Johnson he was apt to be on the
Roman