house, and who knew as little as I did for what market I was laying up
the raw materials of their oft-told tales."[10] What attracted him in
his boyhood, and what continued to attract him, was the picturesque
incident, the color of the past, the mere look of its varied activity.
The philosophy of history was gradually revealed to him, however, and
his generalizing faculty found congenial employment in tracing out the
relation of men to movements, of national impulses to world history. But
however much he might exercise his analytical powers, history was never
abstract to him, nor did it require an effort for him to conjure up
scenes of the past. An acquaintance with the stores of early literature
served to give him the spirit of remote times as well as to feed his
literary tastes. On this side he had an ample equipment for critical
work, conditioned, of course, by the other qualities of his mind, which
determined how the equipment should be used.

That Scott was not a dull digger in heaps of ancient lore was owing to
his imaginative power,--the second of the qualities which we have
distinguished as dominating his literary temperament. "I can see as many
castles in the clouds as any man," he testified.[11] A recent writer has
said that Scott had more than any other man that ever lived a sense of
the romantic, and adds that his was that true romance which "lies not
upon the outside of life, but absolutely in the centre of it."[12] The
situations and the very objects that he described have the power of
stirring the romantic spirit in his readers because he was alive to the
glamour surrounding anything which has for generations been connected
with human thoughts and emotions. The subjectivity which was so
prominent an element in the romanticism of Shelley, Keats, and Byron,
does not appear in Scott's work. Nor was his sense of the mystery of
things so subtle as that of Coleridge. But Scott, rather than Coleridge,
was the interpreter to his age of the romantic spirit, for the ordinary