occupied in a different way. He was a historical critic no less than a
historical romancer. A larger proportion of his criticism concerns
itself with the eighteenth century, perhaps, than of his fiction,[2] and
he often wrote reviews of contemporary literature, but on the whole the
literature with which he dealt critically was representative of those
periods of time which he chose to portray in novel and poem. This
evidently implies great breadth of scope. Yet Scott's vivid sense of the
past had its bounds, as Professor Masson pointed out.[3] It was the
"Gothic" past that he venerated. The field of his studies,
chronologically considered, included the period between his own time and
the crusades; and geographically, was in general confined to England and
Scotland, with comparatively rare excursions abroad. When, in his
novels, he carried his Scottish or English heroes out of Britain into
foreign countries, he was apt to bestow upon them not only a special
endowment of British feeling, but also a portion of that interest in
their native literature which marked the taste of their creator. We find
that the personages in his books are often distinguished by that love of
stirring poetry, particularly of popular and national poetry, which was
a dominant trait in Scott's whole literary career.

With Scotland and with popular poetry any discussion of Sir Walter
properly begins. The love of Scottish minstrelsy first awakened his
literary sense, and the stimulus supplied by ballads and romances never
lost its force. We may say that the little volumes of ballad chap-books
which he collected and bound up before he was a dozen years old
suggested the future editor, as the long poem on the Conquest of
Grenada, which he is said to have written and burned when he was
fifteen, foreshadowed the poet and romancer.

Yet Scott's career as an author began rather late. He published a few