public applause
and private profit.... I cannot, in my knowledge of letters, recollect
more than two men whose merit is undeniable while, I am afraid, their
circumstances are narrow. I mean Coleridge and Maturin."

Scott's whole attitude toward criticism shows that he felt its supreme
function to be elucidation. It should also, he believed, warn the world
against books that were foolish, or pernicious, intellectually or
morally; but unless there were good reason for issuing such warnings the
bad books should be ignored and the good treated sympathetically, not
without such discrimination as should distinguish between the better and
the worse in them, but with emphasis on the better. His literary creed,
though not formulated into a system, was conscious and fairly definite;
but it consisted of general principles which never resolved themselves
into intricate subtleties requiring great space for their development.
Scott could not think in that way, and he felt convinced that such
thinking was useless and worse than useless. A magazine-writer of his
own period who said of him,--"The author of _Waverley_, we apprehend,
has neither the patience nor the disposition requisite for writing
philosophically upon any subject,"[469] was mistaken, for much of
Scott's criticism, without making any pretensions, is really
philosophical. But any fine-drawn analysis seemed to him to serve the
vanity of the critic rather than the need of the public; and he despised
that arrogance in the critic which leads him to assume to direct
literary taste.

Historical illustration was that kind of editorial work which he found
most congenial, and which harmonized best with his critical principles;
for when he could bring definite facts to the service of elucidation he
felt that he was doing something worth while. Among all the
introductions and annotations that we have from his hand, including
those of the _Dryden_ and the _Swift_, this kind of explanation greatly
predominates over the more strictly literary comment; in his reviews,
also, it is evident that he seized every opportunity for turning from
literary to historical discussion. He was in the habit of "embroidering
the subject, whatever it might be, with lively anecdotic
illustration,"[470] as one of his biographers says. We are not to
conclude that in writing on specifically literary subjects he felt ill
at ease. He felt, on the contrary, that the objection lay in the too
great ease with wh