Byron; although Byron was a peer and inherited his domain, while Scott
was a commoner and created his. Too much has been said in condemnation
of Scott's weakness in this respect; that his highest ambition was to
become a _laird_ and found a family; that he was more gratified when the
King made him a baronet than when the public bought his books, that the
expenses of Abbotsford and the hospitalities which he extended to all
comers wasted his time and finally brought about his bankruptcy. Leslie
Stephen and others have even made merry over Scott's Gothic,[14]
comparing his plaster-of-Paris 'scutcheons and ceilings in imitation of
carved oak with the pinchbeck architecture of Strawberry Hill, and
intimating that the feudalism in his romances was only a shade more
genuine than the feudalism of "The Castle of Otranto." Scott was
imprudent; Abbotsford was his weakness, but it was no ignoble weakness.
If the ideal of the life which he proposed to himself there was scarcely
a heroic one, neither was it vulgar or selfish. The artist or the
philosopher should perhaps be superior to the ambition of owning land and
having "a stake in the country," but the ambition is a very human one and
has its good side. In Scott the desire was more social than personal.
It was not that title and territory were feathers in his cap, but that
they bound him more closely to the dear soil of Scotland and to the
national, historic past.

The only deep passion in Scott's poetry is patriotism, the passion of
place. In his metrical romances the rush of the narrative and the vivid,
picturesque beauty of the descriptions are indeed exciting to the
imagination; but it is only when the chord of national feeling is touched
that the verse grows lyrical, that the heart is reached, and that tears
come into the reader's eyes, as they must have done into the poet's. A
dozen such passages occur at once to the memory; the last stand of the
Scottish nobles around their king at Flodden; the view of