write anything about the author unless I know it can hurt no one alive"[244] but for the first volume of the Quarterly he reviewed Sir John Carr’s Caledonian Sketches in a way that Sharon Turner seriously objected to, because it made Sir John seem ridiculous.[245] Some of Scott’s critics would perhaps apply one of the strictures to himself:  “Although Sir John quotes Horace, he has yet to learn that a wise man should not admire too easily; for he frequently falls into a state of wonderment at what appears to us neither very new nor very extraordinary."[246] But if admiration seems to characterize too great a proportion of Scott’s critical work, it is because he usually preferred to ignore such books as demanded the sarcastic treatment which he reprehended, but which he felt perfectly capable of applying when he wished.  Speaking of a fulsome biography he once said, “I can no more sympathize with a mere eulogist than I can with a ranting hero upon the stage; and it unfortunately happens that some of our disrespect is apt, rather unjustly, to be transferred to the subject of the panegyric in the one case, and to poor Cato in the other."[247]

Besides Scott’s formal reviews, we find cited as evidence of his extreme amiability his letters, his journal, and the remarks he made to friends in moments of enthusiasm.  These do indeed contain some sweeping statements, but in almost every case one can see some reason, other than the desire to be obliging, why he made them.  He was not double-faced.  One of the nearest approaches to it seems to have been in the case of Miss Seward’s poetry, for which he wrote such an introduction as hardly prepares the reader for the remark he made to Miss Baillie, that most of it was “absolutely execrable.”  His comment in the edition of the poems—­the publication of which Miss Seward really forced upon him as a dying request—­is sedulously kind, and in Waverley he quotes from her a couple of lines which he calls “beautiful.”  But the essay is most carefully guarded, and throughout it the editor implies that the woman was more admirable than the poetry.  Personally, indeed, he seems to have liked and admired her.[248]

The catalogue of Scott’s contemporaries is so full of important names that his genius for the enjoyment of other men’s work had a wide opportunity to display itself without becoming absurd.  An argument early used to prove that Scott was the author of Waverley was the frequency of quotation in the novels from all living poets except Scott himself, and he felt constrained to throw in a reference or two to his own poetry in order to weaken the force of the evidence.[249] The reader is irresistibly reminded of the following description, given by Lockhart in a letter to his wife, of a morning walk taken by Wordsworth and Scott in company:  “The Unknown was continually quoting Wordsworth’s Poetry and Wordsworth ditto, but the great Laker never uttered one syllable by which it might have been intimated to a stranger that your Papa had ever written a line either of verse or prose since he was born."[250]