He was really optimistic, except on some political questions.  In his Lives of the Novelists he shows that he thought manners and morals had improved in the previous hundred years; and none of his reviews exhibits the feeling so common among men of letters in all ages, that their own times are intellectually degenerate.  It is true that he looked back to the days of Blair, Hume, Adam Smith, Robertson, and Ferguson, as the “golden days of Edinburgh,"[27] but those golden days were no farther away than his own boyhood, and he had felt the exhilaration of the stimulating society which he praised.  One of his contemporaries spoke of Scott’s own works as throwing “a literary splendour over his native city";[28] and George Ticknor said of him, “He is indeed the lord of the ascendant now in Edinburgh, and well deserves to be, for I look upon him to be quite as remarkable in intercourse and conversation, as he is in any of his writings, even in his novels."[29] But he could hardly be expected to perceive the luster surrounding his own personality, and this one instance of regret for former days counts little against the abundant evidence that he thought the world was improving.  Yet of all his contemporaries he was probably the one who looked back at the past with the greatest interest.  The impression made by the author of Waverley upon the mind of a young enthusiast of his own time is too delightful to pass over without quotation.  “He has no eccentric sympathies or antipathies”; wrote J.L.  Adolphus, “no maudlin philanthropy or impertinent cynicism; no nondescript hobby-horse; and with all his matchless energy and originality of mind, he is content to admire popular books, and enjoy popular pleasures; to cherish those opinions which experience has sanctioned; to reverence those institutions which antiquity has hallowed; and to enjoy, admire, cherish, and reverence all these with the same plainness, simplicity, and sincerity as our ancestors did of old."[30]

By temperament, then, Scott was enthusiastic over the past and cheerful in regard to his own day; he was imaginative, practical, genial; and these traits must be taken into account in judging his critical writings.  These and other qualities may be deduced from the most superficial study of his creative work.  The mere bulk of that work bears witness to two things:  first that Scott was primarily a creative writer; again, that he was of those who write much rather than minutely.  It is obvious that to attack details would be easy.  And since he was only secondarily a critic, it is natural that his critical opinions should not have been erected into any system.  But while they are essentially desultory, they are the ideas of a man whose information and enthusiasm extended through a wide range of studies; and they are rendered impressive by the abundance, variety, and energy, which mark them as characteristic of Scott.

CHAPTER III