who could not be prevented from usurping the place of the heroes.  “I was always a willing listener to tales of broil and battle and hubbub of every kind,” he wrote in later life, “and now I look back upon it, I think what a godsend I must have been while a boy to the old Trojans of 1745, nay 1715, who used to frequent my father’s house, and who knew as little as I did for what market I was laying up the raw materials of their oft-told tales."[10] What attracted him in his boyhood, and what continued to attract him, was the picturesque incident, the color of the past, the mere look of its varied activity.  The philosophy of history was gradually revealed to him, however, and his generalizing faculty found congenial employment in tracing out the relation of men to movements, of national impulses to world history.  But however much he might exercise his analytical powers, history was never abstract to him, nor did it require an effort for him to conjure up scenes of the past.  An acquaintance with the stores of early literature served to give him the spirit of remote times as well as to feed his literary tastes.  On this side he had an ample equipment for critical work, conditioned, of course, by the other qualities of his mind, which determined how the equipment should be used.

That Scott was not a dull digger in heaps of ancient lore was owing to his imaginative power,—­the second of the qualities which we have distinguished as dominating his literary temperament.  “I can see as many castles in the clouds as any man,” he testified.[11] A recent writer has said that Scott had more than any other man that ever lived a sense of the romantic, and adds that his was that true romance which “lies not upon the outside of life, but absolutely in the centre of it."[12] The situations and the very objects that he described have the power of stirring the romantic spirit in his readers because he was alive to the glamour surrounding anything which has for generations been connected with human thoughts and emotions.  The subjectivity which was so prominent an element in the romanticism of Shelley, Keats, and Byron, does not appear in Scott’s work.  Nor was his sense of the mystery of things so subtle as that of Coleridge.  But Scott, rather than Coleridge, was the interpreter to his age of the romantic spirit, for the ordinary person likes his wonders so tangible that he may know definitely the point at which they impinge upon his consciousness.  In Scott’s work the point of contact is made clear:  the author brings his atmosphere not from another world but from the past, and with all its strangeness it has no unearthly quality.  In general the romance of his nature is rather taken for granted than insisted on, for there are the poems and the novels to bear witness to that side of his temperament; and the surprising thing is that such an author was a business man, a large landowner, an industrious lawyer.[13]