At one time Lamb wrote to Sir Walter asking a contribution toward a fund that was being raised to help William Godwin out of pecuniary troubles, and Scott replied, through the artist Haydon, with a cheque for ten pounds and a pleasant message to Mr.Lamb, "whom I should be happy to see in Scotland, though I have not forgotten his metropolitan preference of houses to rocks, and citizens to wild rustics and highland men."[316] Hazlitt and Hunt were two other writers whose literary work Scott ignored.[317] This, as well as his neglect of Lamb's and DeQuincey's essays, may be due largely to the fact that he seldom read newspapers and magazines, and these writers were journalists and contributors to periodicals.

Voracious reader as Scott was, he had to economize time somewhere, and the hours saved from papers could be given to books.

We do find one or two references to these men as political writers.

Scott hoped Lockhart would learn, as editor of the _Quarterly_, to despise petty adversaries, for "to take notice of such men as Hazlitt and Hunt in the _Quarterly_ would be to introduce them into a world which is scarce conscious of their existence."[318] Among novelists, those of Scott's contemporaries to whom he gave the highest praise were women.

This is, however to be expected, and it is natural to find Jane Austen receiving the highest praise of all; since Scott was emphatically not of the tribe of critics who are able to appreciate only one kind of novel or poem.