critical attitude such as we should hardly demand in any case from a man of letters commenting on his contemporaries and friends.  George Ticknor was greatly impressed by the “right-mindedness” of the young Sophia Scott,[486] and we may fairly adopt the word to describe the father whom she so much resembled.  There was in him, as Carlyle said, “such a sunny current of true humour and humanity, a free joyful sympathy with so many things; what of fire he had all lying so beautifully latent, as radical latent heat, as fruitful internal warmth of life;—­a most robust, healthy man!"[487]

Writers upon Scott have made much, perhaps too much, of his feeling that his position as a landed gentleman was more enviable than his prominence as a writer.  The point would be of greater consequence if it performed so important a function in explaining his work as has commonly been assigned to it.  We are told that he wrote much and hastily because he wanted money to establish and support an estate; but the truth is that if he wrote at all he had to write in this way.  He justly believed that he could do his best work so.  Yet it was a natural result of his facility that he should look upon the literature he produced as of comparatively little moment.  Some of his remarks about his critical work, however, show that he really regarded creative writing as the business of his life, and that in contrast with it he considered his criticism a relief from more arduous labor.  After the publication of Marmion he wrote:  “I have done with poetry for some time—­it is a scourging crop, and ought not to be hastily repeated.  Editing, therefore, may be considered as a green crop of turnips or peas, extremely useful for those whose circumstances do not admit of giving their farm a summer fallow."[488] After years of novel-writing he said of writing a review, “No one that has not laboured as I have done on imaginary topics can judge of the comfort afforded by walking on all-fours, and being grave and dull."[489]

From what Scott said about Dryden as a critic we may conclude that the unsystematic character of his own scholarly work may have been a matter of principle as well as inclination.  “Dryden,” he wrote, “forebore, from prudence, indolence, or a regard for the freedom of Parnassus, to erect himself into a legislator."[490] The words remind us of comments made upon Scott’s own work, as for example by Professor Masson, who spoke of “the shrewdness and sagacity of some of his critical prefaces to his novels, where he discusses principles of literature without seeming to call them such."[491] Scott was quick to notice “cant and slang"[492] in the professional language of men in all arts; and he valued most highly the remarks of those whose intelligence had not been overlaid by a conventional pedantry.