Every genius is self-educated, and we find Scott from the first making instinctive selections and rejections among the various kinds of knowledge offered him.  At school he would learn no Greek, and wrote a theme in which he maintained, to the wrath of his teacher, that Ariosto was a better poet than Homer.  In later life he declared that he had forgotten even the letters of the Greek alphabet.  Latin would have fared as badly, had not his interest in Matthew Paris and other monkish chroniclers “kept up a kind of familiarity with the language even in its rudest state.”  “To my Gothic ear, the ‘Stabat Mater,’ the ’Dies Irae,’[4] and some of the other hymns of the Catholic Church are more solemn and affecting than the fine classical poetry of Buchanan.”  In our examination of Scott’s early translations from the German,[5] it has been noticed how exclusively he was attracted by the romantic department of that literature, passing over, for instance, Goethe’s maturer work, to fix upon his juvenile drama “Goetz von Berlichingen.”  Similarly he learned Italian just to read in the original the romantic poets Tasso, Ariosto, Boiardo, and Pulci.  When he first went to London in 1799, “his great anxiety,” reports Lockhart, “was to examine the antiquities of the Tower and Westminster Abbey, and to make some researches among the MSS. of the British Museum.”  From Oxford, which he visited in 1803, he brought away only “a grand but indistinct picture of towers and chapels and oriels and vaulted halls”, having met there a reception which, as he modestly acknowledges, “was more than such a truant to the classic page as myself was entitled to expect at the source of classic learning.”  Finally, in his last illness, when sent to Rome to recover from the effects of a paralytic stroke, his ruling passion was strong in death.  He examined with eagerness the remains of the mediaeval city, but appeared quite indifferent to that older Rome which speaks to the classical student.  It will be remembered that just the contrary of this was true of Addison, when he was in Italy a century before.[6] Scott was at no pains to deny or to justify the one-sidedness of his culture.  But when Erskine remonstrated with him for rambling on

          “through brake and maze
  With harpers rude, of barbarous days,”

and urged him to compose a regular epic on classical lines, he good-naturedly but resolutely put aside the advice.

  “Nay, Erskine, nay—­On the wild hill
  Let the wild heath-bell[7] flourish still . . . . 
  Though wild as cloud, as stream, as gale,
  Flow forth, flow unrestrained, my tale!” [8]