of him but of the _genre_. All romanticists are resurrectionists; their
art is an elaborate make-believe. It is enough for their purpose if the
world which they re-create has the look of reality, the _verisimile_ if
not the _verum_. That Scott's genius was _in extenso_ rather than _in
intenso_, that his work is largely improvisation, that he was not a
miniature, but a distemper painter, splashing large canvasses with a
coarse brush and gaudy pigments, all these are commonplaces of criticism.
Scott's handling was broad, vigorous, easy, careless, healthy, free. He
was never subtle, morbid, or fantastic, and had no niceties or secrets.
He was, as Coleridge said of Schiller, "master, not of the intense drama
of passion, but the diffused drama of history." Therefore, because his
qualities were popular and his appeal was made to the people, the general
reader, he won a hearing for his cause, which Coleridge or Keats or
Tieck, with his closer workmanship, could never have won. He first and
he alone _popularised_ romance. No literature dealing with the feudal
past has ever had the currency and the universal success of Scott's. At
no time has mediaevalism held so large a place in comparison with other
literary interests as during the years of his greatest vogue, say from
1805 to 1830.

The first point to be noticed about Scott is the thoroughness of his
equipment. While never a scholar in the academic sense, he was, along
certain chosen lines, a really learned man. He was thirty-four when he
published "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" (1805), the first of his series
of metrical romances and the first of his poems to gain popular favour.
But for twenty years he had been storing his mind with the history,
legends, and ballad poetry of the Scottish border, and was already a
finished antiquarian. The bent and limitations of his genius were early
determined, and it remained to the end wonderfully constant to its
object. At the age of twelve he had begun a collection of manuscript