That is a little ungenerous, a little complacent; noble and large
as Scott's own unconsidered writings are, he ought to have been
aware that methods differ. What, for instance, could be more
extraordinary than the contrast between Scott and Wordsworth--Scott
with his "You know I don't care a curse about what I write;" and
Wordsworth, whose chief reading in later days was his own poetry.
Whenever the two are brought into actual juxtaposition, Wordsworth
is all pose and self-absorption; Scott all simplicity and disregard
of fame. Wordsworth staying at Abbotsford declines to join an
expedition of pleasure, and stays at home with his daughter. When
the party return, they find Wordsworth sitting and being read to by
his daughter, the book his own Excursion. A party of travellers
arrive, and Wordsworth steals down to the chaise, to see if there
are any of his own volumes among the books they have with them.
When the two are together, Scott is all courteous deference; he
quotes Wordsworth's poems, he pays him stately compliments, which
the bard receives as a matter of course, with stiff, complacent
bows. But, during the whole of the time, Wordsworth never lets fall
a single syllable from which one could gather that he was aware
that his host had ever put pen to paper.

Yet, while one desires to shake Wordsworth to get some of his
pomposity out of him, one half desires that Scott had felt a little
more deeply the dignity of his vocation. One would wish to have
infused Wordsworth with a little of Scott's unselfish simplicity,
and to have put just a little stiffening into Scott. He ought to
have felt--and he did not--that to be a great writer was a more
dignified thing than to be a sham seigneur.

But through the darkening scene, when the woods whisper together,