felt in the English landscape, because its images may more forcibly arrest his attentlon by their novelty.  And were this not so, were the inalienable impressiveness of tropical scenery always to give the poet who described it a superiority in effect, this would not prove the superiority of his imagination.  For either he has been familiar with such scenes, and imagines them just as the other poet imagines his English landscape—–­by an effort of mental vision, calling up the absent objects; or he has merely read the descriptions of others, and from these makes up his picture.  It is the same with his rival, who also recalls and recombines.  Foolish critics often betray their ignorance by saying that a painter or a writer “only copies what he has seen, or puts down what he has known.”  They forget that no man imagines what he has not seen or known, and that it is in the selection of the characteristic details that the artistic power is manifested.  Those who suppose that familiarity with scenes or characters enables a painter or a novelist to “copy” them with artistic effect, forget the well-known fact that the vast majority of men are painfully incompetent to avail themselves of this familiarity, and cannot form vivid pictures even to themselves of scenes in which they pass their daily lives; and if they could imagine these, they would need the delicate selective instinct to guide them in the admission and omission of details, as well as in the grouping of the images.  Let any one try to “copy” the wife or brother he knows so well,—­to make a human image which shall speak and act so as to impress strangers with a belief in its truth,—­and he will then see that the much-despised reliance on actual experience is not the mechanical procedure it is believed to be.  When Scott drew Saladin and Ceaur de Lion he did not really display more imaginative power than when he drew the Mucklebackits, although the majority of readers would suppose that the one demanded a great effort of imagination, whereas the other formed part of his familiar experiences of Scottish life.  The mistake here lies in confounding the sources from which the materials were derived with the plastic power of forming these materials into images.  More conscious effort may have been devoted to the collection of the materials in the one case than in the other, but that this has nothing to do with the imaginative power employed may readily be proved by an analysis of the intellectual processes of composition.  Scott had often been in fishermen’s cottages and heard them talk; from the registered experience of a thousand details relating to the life of the poor, their feelings and their thoughts, he gained that material upon which his imagination could work; in the case of Saladin and Ceaur de Lion he had to gain these principally through books and his general experience of life; and the images he formed—­the vision he had of Mucklebackit and Saladin—­must be set down to his artistic faculty, not to his experience or erudition.