From Coleridge Scott is separated in the most definite way.  Coleridge began at the foundation, building up a set of principles such as the new impulse in literature seemed to demand.  Scott preferred the concrete, and was stimulated by the particular book to express opinions that would never have come to his mind as the result of pursuing a train of unembodied ideas.  Coleridge’s judgments, moreover, would be unaffected by public estimation, for he sought to found them on the spiritual and philosophic consciousness that exists apart from the crowd.[466] Scott, on the other hand, was ready to use popular judgment as an important test of his opinions.  Coleridge himself pointed out another interesting contrast.  He wrote:  “Dear Sir Walter Scott and myself were exact, but harmonious opposites in this;—­that every old ruin, hill, river, or tree, called up in his mind a host of historical or biographical associations, ... whereas, for myself, notwithstanding Dr. Johnson, I believe I should walk over the plain of Marathon without taking more interest in it than in any other plain of similar features."[467] We might perhaps say that Coleridge’s affection was given to ideas, Scott’s, to objects; hence Coleridge was a critic of literary principles and theories, Scott a critic of individual books and writers.  It follows that Scott was on the whole an impressionistic critic.  A study of his personality is essential to a consideration of his critical work, for he was not so much a systematic student of literature, guided by fixed principles, as a man of a certain temperament who read particular things and made particular remarks about them as he felt inclined.  The inconsistencies and contradictions which would naturally result from such a procedure are occasionally noticeable, but they are fewer than would occur in the work of a less well-balanced man than himself.

His ideas about criticism were influenced by his feeling that the judgment of the public would after all take its own course, and that it was in the long run the best criterion.  He used his opinion that an author, even in his own lifetime, commonly receives fair treatment from the public, as an argument against establishing in England any literary body having the power of pensioning literary men.[468] On this subject he said, “There is ... really no occasion for encouraging by a society the competition of authors.  The land is before them, and if they really have merit they seldom fail to conquer their share of public applause and private profit....  I cannot, in my knowledge of letters, recollect more than two men whose merit is undeniable while, I am afraid, their circumstances are narrow.  I mean Coleridge and Maturin.”