person likes his wonders so tangible that he may know definitely the
point at which they impinge upon his consciousness. In Scott's work the
point of contact is made clear: the author brings his atmosphere not
from another world but from the past, and with all its strangeness it
has no unearthly quality. In general the romance of his nature is rather
taken for granted than insisted on, for there are the poems and the
novels to bear witness to that side of his temperament; and the
surprising thing is that such an author was a business man, a large
landowner, an industrious lawyer.[13]

Scott's imaginative sense, which clothed in fine fancies any incident or
scene presented, however nakedly, to his view, accounts in part for his
notorious tendency to overrate the work of other writers, especially
those who wrote stories in any form. This explanation was hinted at by
Sir Walter himself, and formulated by Lockhart; it seems a fairly
reasonable way of accounting for a trait that at first appears to
indicate only a foolish excess of good-nature. This rich and active
imagination, which Scott brought to bear on everything he read, perhaps
explains also his habit of paying little attention to carefully worked
out details, and of laying almost exclusive emphasis upon main outlines.
When he was writing his _Life of Napoleon_, he said in his _Journal_:
"Better a superficial book which brings well and strikingly together the
known and acknowledged facts, than a dull boring narrative, pausing to
see further into a mill-stone at every moment than the nature of the
mill-stone admits."[14] Probably his high gift of imagination made him a
little impatient with the remoter reaches of the analytic faculties. Any
sustained exercise of the pure reason was outside his province,
reasonable as he was in everyday affairs. He preferred to consider
facts, and to theorize only so far as was necessary to establish
comfortable relations between the facts,--never to the extent of trying