popularity, and of that deficiency in his poetry of which so many of
his admirers become conscious when they compare him with other and
richer poets. Scott used to say that in poetry Byron "bet" him; and no
doubt that in which chiefly as a poet he "bet" him, was in the
variety, the richness, the lustre of his effects. A certain ruggedness
and bareness was of the essence of Scott's idealism and romance. It
was so in relation to scenery. He told Washington Irving that he loved
the very nakedness of the Border country. "It has something," he said,
"bold and stern and solitary about it. When I have been for some time
in the rich scenery about Edinburgh, which is like ornamented
garden-land, I begin to wish myself back again among my honest grey
hills, and if I did not see the heather at least once a year, _I think
I should die_."[14] Now, the bareness which Scott so loved in his
native scenery, there is in all his romantic elements of feeling. It
is while he is bold and stern, that he is at his highest ideal point.
Directly he begins to attempt rich or pretty subjects, as in parts of
_The Lady of the Lake_, and a good deal of _The Lord of the Isles_,
and still more in _The Bridal of Triermain_, his charm disappears. It
is in painting those moods and exploits, in relation to which Scott
shares most completely the feelings of ordinary men, but experiences
them with far greater strength and purity than ordinary men, that he
triumphs as a poet. Mr. Lockhart tells us that some of Scott's senses
were decidedly "blunt," and one seems to recognize this in the
simplicity of his romantic effects. "It is a fact," he says,
"which some philosophers may think worth setting down, that Scott's
organization, as to more than one of the senses, was the reverse of
exquisite. He had very little of what musicians call an ear; his smell
was hardly more delicate. I have seen him stare about, quite
unconscious of the cause, when his whole company betrayed their
uneasiness at the approach of an overkept haunch of venison; and