Scott’s criticism was largely appreciative, but appreciative on a somewhat different plane from that of the contemporary critics whom we are accustomed to place in a more modern school:  Hazlitt, Hunt, Lamb, and Coleridge.  His judgments were less delicate and subtle than the judgments of these men were apt to be, and more “reasonable” in the eighteenth-century sense; they were marked, however, by a regard for the imagination that would have seemed most unreasonable to many men of the eighteenth century.

Scott had not a fixed theory of literature which could dominate his mind when he approached any work.  He was open-minded, and in spite of his extreme fondness for the poetry of Dr. Johnson he was apt to be on the Romantic side in any specific critical utterance.  We have seen also that he resembled the Romanticists in his power to disengage his verdicts on literature from ethical considerations.  On the other hand he seems always to have deferred to the standard authorities of the classical criticism of his time when his own knowledge was not sufficient to guide him.  In discussing Roscommon’s Essay on Translated Verse he wrote:  “It must be remembered that the rules of criticism, now so well known as to be even trite and hackneyed, were then almost new to the literary world."[463]

Perhaps the main reason why one would not class Scott’s critical work with that of the Romanticists is that he had no desire to proclaim a new era in creative literature or in criticism.  Like the Romanticists he was ready to substitute “for the absolute method of judging by reference to an external standard of ‘taste,’ a method at once imaginative and historical";[464] yet he talked less about imagination than about good sense.  The comparison with Boileau suggests itself, for Scott admired that critic in the conventional fashion, calling him “a supereminent authority,"[465] and Boileau also had said much about “reason and good sense.”  But Scott had an appreciation of the furor poeticus that made “good sense” quite a different thing to him from what it was to Boileau.  He did not say, moreover, that the poet should be supremely characterized by good sense, but that the critic, recognizing the facts about human emotion, should make use of that quality.

The subjective process by which experience is transmuted into literature engaged Scott’s attention very little:  in this respect also he stands apart from the newer school of critics.  The metaphysical description of imagination or fancy interested him less than the piece of literature in which these qualities were exhibited.  His own mental activities were more easily set in motion than analysed, and the introspective or philosophical attitude of mind was unnatural to him.  Because of his adoption of the historical method of studying literature, and the similarity of many of his judgments to those which were in general characteristic of the Romantic school, we may say that Scott’s criticism looks forward; but it shows the influence of the earlier period in its acceptance of traditional judgments based on external standards which disregarded the nature of the creative process.