Among continental writers belonging to his period, Goethe was very properly the one for whom Scott had the strongest admiration.  But we find comparatively few references to his reading the great German after the early period of translation.  Throughout Lockhart’s Life of Scott it is evident that the biographer had a more thorough acquaintance with Goethe than had Scott, and it seems probable that the younger man influenced the elder in his judgment on Faust and on Goethe’s character.  In the Introduction to Quentin Durward we find an interesting comment on Goethe’s success in creating a really wicked Mephistopheles, who escapes the noble dignity that Milton and Byron gave to their pictures of Satan.  Goethe and Scott exchanged letters once in 1827,[339] and it was a personal grief to Sir Walter that the German poet’s death prevented a visit Scott proposed to make him in 1832.  In Anne of Geierstein Goethe is called “an author born to arouse the slumbering fame of his country";[340] and in the Journal Scott characterizes him as “the Ariosto at once and almost the Voltaire of Germany."[341] The suggestion for the character of Fenella in Peveril of the Peak was taken from Goethe, as we learn by Scott’s acknowledgment in the Introduction.  Another German from whom Scott borrowed a suggestion—­this time for the unlucky “White Lady of Avenel”—­was the Baron de la Motte Fouque.  Scott was evidently interested in his work, though he thought Fouque sometimes used such a profusion of historical and antiquarian lore that readers would find it difficult to follow the narrative.[342] Sir Walter asked his son to tell the Baroness de la Motte Fouque that he had been much interested in her writings and those of the Baron, and added, “It will be civil, for folks like to know that they are known and respected beyond the limits of their own country."[343]

In the literary circles of Paris Scott more than once experienced the pleasure of finding himself “known and respected” by foreigners,[344] and he had intimate relations with men of letters in London.  On one of his visits there he saw Byron almost every morning for some time, at the house of Murray the publisher.  In Edinburgh society Scott was naturally a prominent figure, being noted for his fund of anecdote and his superior gifts in presiding at dinners.  But however much his kindly personal feeling is reflected in his comments on the literary work of his friends, he was too well-balanced to assume anything of the patronizing tone that such success as his might have made natural to another sort of man.  His fellow-poets thought him a delightful person whom they liked so much that they could almost forgive the preposterous success of his facile and unimportant poetry.