I can get on quite as well from recollection, while sitting in the Parliament house, as if wandering through wood and wold."[445] At another time he said, "If a man will paint from nature, he will be likely to amuse those who are daily looking at it."[446] Though Scott prided himself somewhat on his descriptive powers he realized that he could not do his best work on minute canvases.

We have already seen how he contrasted himself with Jane Austen.

"The exquisite touch," he said, "which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment, is denied to me."[447] Of Scott's opinion in regard to the ethical effect of novels, I have already spoken.[448] The fact that he refused to use the conventional plea of a desire to improve public morals, and that he understood how little a reader is really influenced by the exalted sentiments of heroes of fiction, gave Carlyle a fit of righteous indignation;[449] but it is futile to say that Scott "had no message to deliver to the world." He might have retorted, in the words which he once used about Homer,--"Doubtless an admirable moral may be often extracted from his poem; because it contains an accurate picture of human nature, which can never be truly presented without conveying a lesson of instruction.

But it may shrewdly be suspected that the moral was as little intended by the author as it would have been the object of an historian, whose work is equally pregnant with morality, though a detail of facts be only intended."[450] It was a comfort to Scott at the end of his life to reflect that the tendency of all he had written was morally good,[451] and we can well believe that he was pleased by the enthusiastic tribute of his young critic, J.L.Adolphus, who said of his books: "There is not an unhandsome action or degrading sentiment recorded of any person who is recommended to the full esteem of the reader."[452] That Scott considered poetical power very important for a writer of novels, he made evident in his _Lives of the Novelists_.

Mr.Herford has said, but surely without good reason, that Scott wholly lacked the sense of mystery, and that in this respect Mrs.Radcliffe was more modern than he.[453] Yet it was Scott who censured Mrs.Radcliffe for explaining her mysteries.