neither by the nose nor the palate could he distinguish corked wine
from sound. He could never tell Madeira from sherry,--nay, an Oriental
friend having sent him a butt of _sheeraz_, when he remembered the
circumstance some time afterwards and called for a bottle to have Sir
John Malcolm's opinion of its quality, it turned out that his butler,
mistaking the label, had already served up half the bin as _sherry_.
Port he considered as physic ... in truth he liked no wines except
sparkling champagne and claret; but even as to the last he was no
connoisseur, and sincerely preferred a tumbler of whisky-toddy to the
most precious 'liquid-ruby' that ever flowed in the cup of a
prince."[15]

However, Scott's eye was very keen:--"_It was commonly him_," as his
little son once said, "_that saw the hare sitting_." And his
perception of colour was very delicate as well as his mere sight. As
Mr. Ruskin has pointed out, his landscape painting is almost all done
by the lucid use of colour. Nevertheless this bluntness of
organization in relation to the less important senses, no doubt
contributed something to the singleness and simplicity of the deeper
and more vital of Scott's romantic impressions; at least there is good
reason to suppose that delicate and complicated susceptibilities do at
least diminish the chance of living a strong and concentrated
life--do risk the frittering away of feeling on the mere backwaters of
sensations, even if they do not directly tend towards artificial and
indirect forms of character. Scott's romance is like his native
scenery,--bold, bare and rugged, with a swift deep stream of strong
pure feeling running through it. There is plenty of colour in his
pictures, as there is on the Scotch hills when the heather is out. And
so too there is plenty of intensity in his romantic situations; but it
is the intensity of simple, natural, unsophisticated, hardy, and manly