in English
verse. But Dryden was the acknowledged head of English literature at the
time, and Scott was a mere beginner. He was probably even better pleased
with the quality of the praise than with the quantity of the pudding.
For though professional criticism, then in no very vigorous state, said
some silly things, it was generally favourable; and a saying of Pitt
(most indifferent, as a rule, of all Prime Ministers to English
literature) is memorable not merely as summing up the general
impression, but as defining what that impression was in a fashion quite
invaluable to the student of literary history. The Pilot that Weathered
the Storm, it seems, said of the description of the Minstrel's
hesitation before playing, 'This is a sort of thing I might have
expected in painting, but could never have fancied capable of being
given by poetry.' To the present generation and the last, the reverse
expression would probably seem more natural. We say, of Mr. Watts or of
Sir Edward Burne-Jones, that they have put, in 'Love and Death' or in
'Love among the Ruins,' what we might have expected from poetry, but
could hardly have thought possible in painting. But a hundred years of
studious convention and generality, of deliberate avoidance of the
poignant, and the vivid, and the detailed, and the coloured in poetry
had made Pitt's confession as natural as another hundred years of
contrary practice from Coleridge to Rossetti have made ours.

The publication of the _Lay_ immediately preceded, and perhaps its
success had no small share in deciding, the most momentous and
unfortunate step of Scott's life, his entry into partnership with James
Ballantyne. The discussion of the whole of this business will best be
postponed till the date of its catastrophe is reached, but a few words
may be said on the probable reasons for it. Much, no doubt, was the
result of that combination of incalculable things which foolish persons
of one kind call mere chance, of which foolish persons of another kind
deny the existence, and which wise men term, from different but not
irreconcilable points of view, Providence, or Luck, or Fate. But a
little can be cleared up. Scott had evidently made up his mind that he
should not succeed at the Bar, and had also persuaded himself that the
very success of the _Lay_ had made failure certain. The ill success of
his brother Thomas, with the writer's business inherited from their
father, perhaps inconvenienced and no doub