His remarks on German drama are general in character, though we know that in his early days he was much interested in translating contemporary German plays.  His version of Goethe’s Goetz von Berlichingen was the most important of these translations.  A letter of Scott’s contains the following reference to this play:[140] “The publication of Goetz was a great era ... in German literature, and served completely to free them from the French follies of unities and decencies of the scene, and gave an impulse to their dramas which was unique of its kind.  Since that, they have been often stark mad but never, I think, stupid.  They either divert you by taking the most brilliant leaps through the hoop, or else by tumbling into the custard, as the newspapers averred the Champion did at the Lord Mayor’s dinner.”

When he is on English ground we can best trace Scott’s individual opinions, yet even here he reflects some of the limitations of the less enlightened scholarship of his time, especially in connection with early Elizabethan writers.  He passes from Ferrex and Porrex[141] and Gammer Gurton’s Needle directly to Shakspere, and quite omits Marlowe and the other immediate predecessors.  He was not ignorant of their existence, for against a statement of Dryden’s that Shakspere was the first to use blank verse we find in Scott’s edition the note,—­“This is a mistake.  Marlowe and several other dramatic authors used blank verse before the days of Shakespeare";[142] and one of his youthful notebooks contains this comment on Faustus:  “A very remarkable thing.  Grand subject—­end grand."[143] In 1831 Scott intended to write an article for the Quarterly Review on Peele, Greene, and Webster, and in asking Alexander Dyce to have Webster’s works sent to him he said, “Marlowe and others I have,—­and some acquaintance with the subject, though not much."[144] Webster he considered “one of the best of our ancient dramatists.”  The proposed article was never written, because of Scott’s final illness.

In spite of his statement that “the English stage might be considered equally without rule and without model when Shakspeare arose,” Scott did not seem inclined to leave the great man altogether unaccounted for, as some critics have preferred to do, for he says, “The effect of the genius of an individual upon the taste of a nation is mighty; but that genius in its turn is formed according to the opinions prevalent at the period when it comes into existence.”  These opinions, however, Scott assigns very vaguely to the influence of “a nameless crowd of obscure writers,” and thinks it fortunate that Shakspere was unacquainted with classical rules.  The critic had evidently made no attempt to define the influence of particular writers upon Shakspere.  His criticism is at some points purely conventional, as for instance when he calls the poet “that powerful magician, whose art could fascinate us even by means of deformity itself “; but on the whole Scott seems to write about Shakspere in a very reasonable and discriminating way.