450 Sir Walter Scott. 



and at last involved him in ruin : but delicacy requires that we 

 should throw a veil over so painful a subject. Scott began by being 

 a poet, and a very popular poet he was ; but whether his stores 

 were exhausted and the freshness and vigour of his imagination 

 faded, or whether the public taste had changed, his latter poems 

 met not with that encouragement which his former productions 

 easily commanded. The true reasons of this failure we suspect to 

 be the structure of the author's mind. He had many of the accif 

 dental qualities, that aid in the constitution of a real poet; but h( 

 was deficient in the essential feature a poetically-creative imagim 

 tion. We have said poetically-creative, because, if we denied his 

 possession of imagination altogether, we should at once convict our- 

 selves of folly. He could create, and did create, resemblances to 

 living characters ; he endued with life and breathed emotions into 

 them, and he made them act on the scene in harmony with their own 

 character and their own times ; he had besides a fresh and lively 

 fancy, by which he was enabled to adorn his works with fragrant 

 beauties charming both to eye and ear: but still he possessed not 

 the poetic imagination the power, as we would define it, not only of 

 producing a striking resemblance to living nature, but of giving to it 

 a certain spirituality and atheriality that is rather a beau ideai^ 

 than a reality of human nature, and an intensity of feeling that 

 extraordinary circumstances alone can elicit, and he had no idea 

 whatever of that grandeur of conception both fin scenery and in 

 character that is essentially requisite to form the genuine poet, for, 

 be it observed, we quite agree with Maecenas's very clever toady, 

 who once said mediocribus esse poetis Non Di non homines, non 

 concessfre columned* To illustrate what we mean by a reference to 

 the sister art, we would not deny the possession of imagination to 

 Hogarth or Wilkie one the moralist the other the simple por- 

 trayer of domestic and low life, nor to Gainsborough and Constable 

 the first of modern landscape painters ; but we would not dream of 

 giving them a place by the side of those who of yore wrought the 

 Apollo and the Dying Gladiator, or in more modern day, produced 

 the Transfiguration, the Last Supper, the Infant Jupiter, and the 

 Illustrations of Milton. f Hogarth would sink before RafFaelle the 

 subjects only, and not the artists being considered ; and Constable, 

 as a poet, would bear no comparison with Claude Lorraine or even 

 with Turner, though the latter's style be not a little meretricious. 

 The author of 'Marmion' would be equally wrongly placed, if we 

 were to give him rank by the side of those who imagined Hamlet 

 and Satan. Christabel and Endymion, the two first sublimely 

 grand, the two last touchingly intense in emotion. In a word, it 



* Non concessere columns, i. e. the booksellers will not buy their works. Messrs. 

 Colburn and Bentley pay for sad trash at present, and at a very high price. The 

 booksellers in Augustus's time were not such fools'. Oh for this too liberal age ! 



f- Let not the reader suppose that we consider Martin on a level with the old mas- 

 ters or with Sir Joshua Reynolds, because he is mentioned in their company. We 

 consider that his conceptions are sublimely grand unequalled by those of any 

 modern artist ; and we on that account the more regret the very incorrect drawing to 

 be seen in all his ipictures. More care and more elaboration would not take away 

 from the merit of the composition. 



