Scott praised the Augustan writers as warmly as Jeffrey did, but he was more hospitable to the newer literary impulse.
"Perhaps the most damaging accusation that can be made against Jeffrey as a critic," says Mr.Gates, "is inability to read and interpret the age in which he lived."[462] Scott's criticism was largely appreciative, but appreciative on a somewhat different plane from that of the contemporary critics whom we are accustomed to place in a more modern school: Hazlitt, Hunt, Lamb, and Coleridge.

His judgments were less delicate and subtle than the judgments of these men were apt to be, and more "reasonable" in the eighteenth-century sense; they were marked, however, by a regard for the imagination that would have seemed most unreasonable to many men of the eighteenth century.
Scott had not a fixed theory of literature which could dominate his mind when he approached any work.

He was open-minded, and in spite of his extreme fondness for the poetry of Dr.Johnson he was apt to be on the Romantic side in any specific critical utterance.

We have seen also that he resembled the Romanticists in his power to disengage his verdicts on literature from ethical considerations.

On the other hand he seems always to have deferred to the standard authorities of the classical criticism of his time when his own knowledge was not sufficient to guide him.