highest ideal point.  Directly he begins to attempt rich or pretty subjects, as in parts of The Lady of the Lake, and a good deal of The Lord of the Isles, and still more in The Bridal of Triermain, his charm disappears.  It is in painting those moods and exploits, in relation to which Scott shares most completely the feelings of ordinary men, but experiences them with far greater strength and purity than ordinary men, that he triumphs as a poet.  Mr. Lockhart tells us that some of Scott’s senses were decidedly “blunt,” and one seems to recognize this in the simplicity of his romantic effects.  “It is a fact,” he says, “which some philosophers may think worth setting down, that Scott’s organization, as to more than one of the senses, was the reverse of exquisite.  He had very little of what musicians call an ear; his smell was hardly more delicate.  I have seen him stare about, quite unconscious of the cause, when his whole company betrayed their uneasiness at the approach of an overkept haunch of venison; and neither by the nose nor the palate could he distinguish corked wine from sound.  He could never tell Madeira from sherry,—­nay, an Oriental friend having sent him a butt of sheeraz, when he remembered the circumstance some time afterwards and called for a bottle to have Sir John Malcolm’s opinion of its quality, it turned out that his butler, mistaking the label, had already served up half the bin as sherry.  Port he considered as physic ... in truth he liked no wines except sparkling champagne and claret; but even as to the last he was no connoisseur, and sincerely preferred a tumbler of whisky-toddy to the most precious ‘liquid-ruby’ that ever flowed in the cup of a prince."[15]

However, Scott’s eye was very keen:—­“It was commonly him,” as his little son once said, “that saw the hare sitting.”  And his perception of colour was very delicate as well as his mere sight.  As Mr. Ruskin has pointed out, his landscape painting is almost all done by the lucid use of colour.  Nevertheless this bluntness of organization in relation to the less important senses, no doubt contributed something to the singleness and simplicity of the deeper and more vital of Scott’s romantic impressions; at least there is good reason to suppose that delicate and complicated susceptibilities do at least diminish the chance of living a strong and concentrated life—­do risk the frittering away of feeling on the mere backwaters of sensations, even if they do not directly tend towards artificial and indirect forms of character.  Scott’s romance is like his native scenery,—­bold, bare and rugged, with a swift deep stream of strong pure feeling running through it.  There is plenty of colour in his pictures, as there is on the Scotch hills when the heather is out.  And so too there is plenty of intensity in his romantic situations; but it is the intensity of simple, natural, unsophisticated, hardy, and manly characters.  But as for subtleties