The men whose work Scott judged fairly and sympathetically represent widely different types.

With some of them he was connected by the new impulse that they were imparting to English poetry, but he was so close to the transition period that he could look backward to his predecessors with no sense of strangeness.

He was never inclined to quarrel with the "erroneous system" of a poem which he really liked.

His comments on Byron's _Darkness_ suggest that if he had read more than he did of Shelley and others among his younger contemporaries he might have found much to reprehend, but he held that "we must not limit poetical merit to the class of composition which exactly suits one's own particular taste."[346] Among novelists even less than among poets can we trace a "school" to which he paid special allegiance.

He read and enjoyed all sorts of good stories, growing in this respect more catholic in his tastes, though perhaps more severe in his standards, as he grew older.
In speaking of Scott's relations with his contemporaries, we must especially remember his ardent interest in those realities of life which he considered greater than the greatest books.