It is sufficiently apparent to any student of Scott’s work that he was personally very fond of the drama.  Many of the literary references and allusions which appear in great abundance throughout his writings are from plays, and show, as we have seen, a wide acquaintance with English dramatic writers, from Shakspere to such comparatively little-known playwrights as Suckling and Cowley.  In the Letters of Malachi Malagrowther on the Currency, for example, Scott’s unusual range of reading reveals itself even in connection with a subject remote from his ordinary field, and here as elsewhere he shows himself prone to quote from the drama.[160] But Scott was interested in plays for what he found in them of characters and manners, of witty and sententious speech, of situations and incidents, and only secondarily in the technical aspects of the drama.  Reading his novels we could guess that he would care more for the concrete elements of a play than for the orderly march of events through the various stages of a formally proper construction.  In this respect he differs from Coleridge; but indeed the two men may be contrasted at almost every point.  In summing up this part of Scott’s criticism we must remember also that it was chiefly incidental.  Perhaps whatever qualities it exhibits are on this account particularly characteristic:  at any rate his opinions on the drama were the reaction of an unusually capable mind upon a department of literature in which his reading was all the more fruitful because it followed the lines of a natural inclination.

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Dryden

Scott’s preparations for his edition of Dryden—­Wide Scope of the work—­Scott’s estimation of Dryden—­Grounds for putting Dryden above Chaucer and Spenser—­Admirable style of the biography—­Comments by Scott on other seventeenth century writers.

The edition of Dryden’s Complete Works deserves further notice, especially since only eight of the eighteen volumes are occupied with the plays, and these have less commentary than other parts of the works.  In 1805 Scott wrote to his friend George Ellis, “My critical notes will not be very numerous but I hope to illustrate the political poems, as Absalom and Achitophel, the Hind and Panther, etc., with some curious annotations.  I have already made a complete search among some hundred pamphlets of that pamphlet-writing age, and with considerable success, as I have found several which throw light on my author."[161] He added that another edition of Dryden was proposed, and Ellis wrote in answer, “With regard to your competitors, I feel perfectly at my ease, because I am convinced that though you should generously furnish them with all the materials, they would not know how to use them; non cuivis hominum contingit to write critical notes that anyone will read."[162]