He was most favorably impressed with the poet's appearance and with everything in his manner.

The boy thought, however, that "Burns' acquaintance with English poetry was rather limited, and also, that having twenty times the abilities of Allan Ramsay and of Ferguson, he talked of them with too much humility as his models."[251] Scott's admiration of Burns was always expressed in the highest and, if one may say so, the most affectionate terms.

He refused to let himself be named "in the same day" with Burns.[252] "Long life to thy fame and peace to thy soul, Rob Burns!" he exclaimed, in his _Journal_; "when I want to express a sentiment which I feel strongly, I find the phrase in Shakespeare--or thee."[253] On another day he compared Burns with Shakspere as excelling all other poets in "the power of exciting the most varied and discordant emotions with such rapid transitions."[254] Again, "The Jolly Beggars, for humorous description and nice discrimination of character, is inferior to no poem of the same length in the whole range of English poetry."[255] Scott wished that Burns might have carried out his plan of dramatic composition, and regretted, from that point of view, the excessive labor at songs which in the nature of things could not all be masterpieces.[256] Of writers who were more precisely contemporaries of Scott, the Lake Poets and Byron are the most important.

The precedence ought to be given to Coleridge because of the suggestion Scott caught from a chance recitation of _Christabel_ for the meter he made so popular in the _Lay_.[257] Fragments from _Christabel_ are quoted or alluded to so often in the novels[258] and throughout Scott's work that we should conclude it had made a greater impression upon him than any other single poem written in his own time, if Lockhart had not spoken of Wordsworth's sonnet on Neidpath Castle as one which Scott was perhaps fondest of quoting.[259] _Christabel_ is not the only one of Coleridge's poems which Scott used for allusion or reference, but it was the favorite.

"He is naturally a grand poet," Scott once wrote to a friend.