lly,
"As to the actual study of nature, if you mean the landscape gardening
of poetry ... I can get on quite as well from recollection, while
sitting in the Parliament house, as if wandering through wood and
wold."[445] At another time he said, "If a man will paint from nature,
he will be likely to amuse those who are daily looking at it."[446]

Though Scott prided himself somewhat on his descriptive powers he
realized that he could not do his best work on minute canvases. We have
already seen how he contrasted himself with Jane Austen. "The exquisite
touch," he said, "which renders ordinary commonplace things and
characters interesting from the truth of the description and the
sentiment, is denied to me."[447]

Of Scott's opinion in regard to the ethical effect of novels, I have
already spoken.[448] The fact that he refused to use the conventional
plea of a desire to improve public morals, and that he understood how
little a reader is really influenced by the exalted sentiments of heroes
of fiction, gave Carlyle a fit of righteous indignation;[449] but it is
futile to say that Scott "had no message to deliver to the world." He
might have retorted, in the words which he once used about
Homer,--"Doubtless an admirable moral may be often extracted from his
poem; because it contains an accurate picture of human nature, which can
never be truly presented without conveying a lesson of instruction. But
it may shrewdly be suspected that the moral was as little intended by
the author as it would have been the object of an historian, whose work
is equally pregnant with morality, though a detail of facts be only
intended."[450] It was a comfort to Scott at the end of his life to
reflect that the tendency of all he had written was morally good,[451]
and we can well believe that he was pleased by the enthusiastic tribute
of his young critic, J.L. Adolphus, who said of his books: "There is not
an unhandsome action or degrading sentiment recorded of any person who
is recommended to the full esteem of the reader."[452]

That Scott considered poetical power very important for a writer of
novels, he made evident in his _Lives of the Novelists_. Mr. Herford has
said, but surely without good reason, that Scott wholly lacked the sense
of mystery, and that in this respect Mrs. Radcliffe was more modern than
he.[453] Yet it was Scott who censured Mrs. Radcliffe for explaining her
mysteries. He had a vein of superstition in his nature, too,