ion, who avowed that no food could to his taste equal Scotch broth,
and in everything but the one fatal delusion was as sound a man of
business as ever partook of that nourishing concoction.

In his execution both in prose and verse, but especially, or at least
more obviously, in the latter there are certain peculiarities, in the
nature (at least partly) of defect, which strike every critical eye at
once. At no time, and in no case, was Scott of the order of the careful,
anxious miniaturists of work, who repaint every stroke a hundred times,
adjust every detail of composition over and over again, and can never
have done with rehandling and perfecting. Nor did he belong to that very
rare class whose work seems to be, at any rate after a slight
apprenticeship, faultless from the first, to whom inelegancies of style,
incorrect rhymes, licences of metre--not deliberate and intended to
produce the effect they achieve, but the effect of carelessness or of
momentary inability to do what is wanted--are by nature or education
impossible. His nature did not give him this endowment, and his
education was of the very last sort to procure it for him. He himself,
not out of pique or conceit, things utterly alien from his nature, still
less out of laziness, but, I believe, as a genuine, and, what is more, a
correct self-criticism, has left in his private writings repeated
expressions of his belief that revision and correction in his case not
only did not improve the work, but were in most cases likely to do it
positive harm, that the spoon was made or the horn spoiled (to adapt his
country proverb) at the first draft, and once for all. I think that this
was a correct judgment, and I do not see that it implies any inferiority
on his part. It is not as if he ever aimed at the methods of the
precisians and failed, as if it was his desire to be a 'correct' writer,
a careful observer of proportion and construction, a producer of artful
felicities in metre, rhythm, rhyme, phrase. We may yield to no one in
the delight of tracing the exact correspondence of strophe and
antistrophe in a Greek chorus, the subtle vowel-music of a Latin hymn or
a passage of Rossetti's. But I cannot see why, because we rejoice in
these things, we should demand them of all poetry, or why, because we
rejoice in the faultless construction of Fielding or the exquisite
finish of Jane Austen as novelists, we should despise the looser
handling and more sweeping touch of S