with Spenser, Drayton, and other poets who have exercised themselves on
romantic fiction--of all themes the most fascinating to a youthful
imagination."

Yet even thus early, a certain solidity was apparent in Scott's studies.
"To the romances and poetry which I chiefly delighted in," he writes, "I
had always added the study of history, especially as connected with
military events." He interested himself, for example, in the art of
fortification; and when confined to his bed by a childish illness, found
amusement in modelling fortresses and "arranging shells and seeds and
pebbles so as to represent encountering armies. . . . I fought my way
thus through Vertot's 'Knights of Malta'--a book which, as it hovered
between history and romance, was exceedingly dear to me."

Every genius is self-educated, and we find Scott from the first making
instinctive selections and rejections among the various kinds of
knowledge offered him. At school he would learn no Greek, and wrote a
theme in which he maintained, to the wrath of his teacher, that Ariosto
was a better poet than Homer. In later life he declared that he had
forgotten even the letters of the Greek alphabet. Latin would have fared
as badly, had not his interest in Matthew Paris and other monkish
chroniclers "kept up a kind of familiarity with the language even in its
rudest state." "To my Gothic ear, the 'Stabat Mater,' the 'Dies
Irae,'[4] and some of the other hymns of the Catholic Church are more
solemn and affecting than the fine classical poetry of Buchanan." In our
examination of Scott's early translations from the German,[5] it has been
noticed how exclusively he was attracted by the romantic department of
that literature, passing over, for instance, Goethe's maturer work, to
fix upon his juvenile drama "Goetz von Berlichingen." Similarly he
learned Italian just to read in the original the romantic poets Tasso,
Ariosto, Boiardo, and Pulci. When he first went to London in 1799, "his
great anxiety," reports Lockhart, "was to examine the antiquities of the
Tower and Westminster Abbey, and to make some researches among the MSS.
of the British Museum." From Oxford, which he visited in 1803, he
brought away only "a grand but indistinct picture of towers and chapels
and oriels and vaulted halls", having met there a reception which, as he
modestly acknowledges, "was more than such a truant to the classic page
as myself was entitled to expect at the source of class