This comment indicates that there was no lack of assuredness in Scott’s treatment, and we do indeed find a very pleasant tone of competence which, though liable to error as in the exaggerated praise bestowed upon Smollett, gives much of their effectiveness to the criticisms.  The quality appears elsewhere in Scott’s critical work, but it is perhaps especially noticeable here.  For example, we find this dictum:  “There is no book in existence, in which so much of the human character, under all its various shades and phases, is described in so few words, as in the Diable Boiteux."[205] The illustration is perhaps a trifle extreme, for Scott is not often really dogmatic.  From this point of view as from others we naturally make the comparison with Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, and we find that without being so sententious, so admirably compact in style, Scott is also not so dictatorial.

We cannot accuse Scott of liking any one kind of novel to the exclusion of others.  He ranks Clarissa Harlowe very high;[206] he says Tom Jones is “truth and human nature itself."[207] The Vicar of Wakefield he calls “one of the most delicious morsels of fictitious composition on which the human mind was ever employed.”  “We return to it again and again,” he says, “and bless the memory of an author who contrives so well to reconcile us to human nature."[208] He praises Tristram Shandy, calling Uncle Toby and his faithful Squire, “the most delightful characters in the work, or perhaps in any other."[209] The quiet fictions of Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen, the exciting tales of Mrs. Radcliffe, the sentiment of Sterne, even the satires of Bage,—­all pleased him in one way or another.  Scott’s autobiography contains the following comment on his boyish tastes in the matter of novels:  “The whole Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy tribe I abhorred, and it required the art of Burney, or the feeling of Mackenzie, to fix my attention upon a domestic tale.  But all that was adventurous and romantic I devoured without much discrimination."[210] In later life he learned to exercise his judgment in regard to stories of adventure not less than those of the “domestic” sort, and perhaps the liking for quiet tales grew upon him; at any rate his taste seems remarkably catholic.

The most interesting portions of the Lives of the Novelists are those which show us, by the frequent recurrence of the same subjects, what parts of the theory of novel-writing had particularly engaged Scott’s attention.  For example we find him discussing, most fully in the Life of Fielding, the reasons why a successful novelist is likely not to be a successful playwright.  The way in which he looks at the matter suggests that he was thinking quite as much of the probability of failure in his own case should he begin to write plays, as of the subject of the memoir; for Fielding wrote his plays before his novels, but the argument assumes a man who writes good novels first