o him, however, and
his generalizing faculty found congenial employment in tracing out the
relation of men to movements, of national impulses to world history. But
however much he might exercise his analytical powers, history was never
abstract to him, nor did it require an effort for him to conjure up
scenes of the past. An acquaintance with the stores of early literature
served to give him the spirit of remote times as well as to feed his
literary tastes. On this side he had an ample equipment for critical
work, conditioned, of course, by the other qualities of his mind, which
determined how the equipment should be used.

That Scott was not a dull digger in heaps of ancient lore was owing to
his imaginative power,--the second of the qualities which we have
distinguished as dominating his literary temperament. "I can see as many
castles in the clouds as any man," he testified.[11] A recent writer has
said that Scott had more than any other man that ever lived a sense of
the romantic, and adds that his was that true romance which "lies not
upon the outside of life, but absolutely in the centre of it."[12] The
situations and the very objects that he described have the power of
stirring the romantic spirit in his readers because he was alive to the
glamour surrounding anything which has for generations been connected
with human thoughts and emotions. The subjectivity which was so
prominent an element in the romanticism of Shelley, Keats, and Byron,
does not appear in Scott's work. Nor was his sense of the mystery of
things so subtle as that of Coleridge. But Scott, rather than Coleridge,
was the interpreter to his age of the romantic spirit, for the ordinary
person likes his wonders so tangible that he may know definitely the
point at which they impinge upon his consciousness. In Scott's work the
point of contact is made clear: the author brings his atmosphere not
from another world but from the past, and with all its strangeness it
has no unearthly quality. In general the romance of his nature is rather
taken for granted than insisted on, for there are the poems and the
novels to bear witness to that side of his temperament; and the
surprising thing is that such an author was a business man, a large
landowner, an industrious lawyer.[13]

Scott's imaginative sense, which clothed in fine fancies any incident or
scene presented, however nakedly, to his view, accounts in part for his
notorious tendency to overrate the work