The relation between the different parts of Scott’s literary work is exemplified by the subjects he treated, for as a critic he touched many portions of the field, which in his capacity of poet and novelist he occupied in a different way.  He was a historical critic no less than a historical romancer.  A larger proportion of his criticism concerns itself with the eighteenth century, perhaps, than of his fiction,[2] and he often wrote reviews of contemporary literature, but on the whole the literature with which he dealt critically was representative of those periods of time which he chose to portray in novel and poem.  This evidently implies great breadth of scope.  Yet Scott’s vivid sense of the past had its bounds, as Professor Masson pointed out.[3] It was the “Gothic” past that he venerated.  The field of his studies, chronologically considered, included the period between his own time and the crusades; and geographically, was in general confined to England and Scotland, with comparatively rare excursions abroad.  When, in his novels, he carried his Scottish or English heroes out of Britain into foreign countries, he was apt to bestow upon them not only a special endowment of British feeling, but also a portion of that interest in their native literature which marked the taste of their creator.  We find that the personages in his books are often distinguished by that love of stirring poetry, particularly of popular and national poetry, which was a dominant trait in Scott’s whole literary career.

With Scotland and with popular poetry any discussion of Sir Walter properly begins.  The love of Scottish minstrelsy first awakened his literary sense, and the stimulus supplied by ballads and romances never lost its force.  We may say that the little volumes of ballad chap-books which he collected and bound up before he was a dozen years old suggested the future editor, as the long poem on the Conquest of Grenada, which he is said to have written and burned when he was fifteen, foreshadowed the poet and romancer.

Yet Scott’s career as an author began rather late.  He published a few translations when he was twenty-five years old, but his first notable work, the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, did not appear until 1802-3, when he was over thirty.  This book, the outgrowth of his early interest in ballads and his own attempts at versifying, exhibited both his editorial and his creative powers.  It led up to the publication of two important volumes which contained material originally intended to form part of the Minstrelsy, but which outgrew that work.  These were the edition of the old metrical romance Sir Tristrem, which showed Scott as a scholar, and the Lay of the Last Minstrel, the first of Scott’s own metrical romances.  So far his literary achievement was all of one kind, or of two or three kinds closely related.  In this first period of his literary life, perhaps even more than later, his editorial impulse, his scholarly activity, was closely connected with the inspiration for original writing.  The Lay of the Last Minstrel was the climax of this series of enterprises.