He wrote: "Dear Sir Walter Scott and myself were exact, but harmonious opposites in this;--that every old ruin, hill, river, or tree, called up in his mind a host of historical or biographical associations, ...

whereas, for myself, notwithstanding Dr.Johnson, I believe I should walk over the plain of Marathon without taking more interest in it than in any other plain of similar features."[467] We might perhaps say that Coleridge's affection was given to ideas, Scott's, to objects; hence Coleridge was a critic of literary principles and theories, Scott a critic of individual books and writers.

It follows that Scott was on the whole an impressionistic critic.

A study of his personality is essential to a consideration of his critical work, for he was not so much a systematic student of literature, guided by fixed principles, as a man of a certain temperament who read particular things and made particular remarks about them as he felt inclined.

The inconsistencies and contradictions which would naturally result from such a procedure are occasionally noticeable, but they are fewer than would occur in the work of a less well-balanced man than himself.
His ideas about criticism were influenced by his feeling that the judgment of the public would after all take its own course, and that it was in the long run the best criterion.