His sympathies were rather with the scholar who opens the store of old poetry to the public, than with him who uses his erudition simply for the benefit of erudite people.  The diction of the Middle Ages was interesting to him only as it reflected the customs and emotions of its period.  He used the romances as authorities on ancient manners.  The Chronicles of Froissart, because they give “a knowledge of mankind,"[83] were almost as much a hobby with him as Thomas the Rhymer, and in this case also he endows characters in his novels with his own fondness for the ancient writer.[84] The fruit of Scott’s acquaintance with Froissart appears prominently in his essay on Chivalry and in various introductions to ballads in the Minstrelsy, as well as in the novels of chivalry.  Scott at one time proposed to publish an edition of Malory, but abandoned the project on learning that Southey had the same thing in mind.[85]

The first periodical review Scott ever published was on the subject of the Amadis de Gaul, as translated by Southey and by Rose.  The article is long and very carefully constructed, and expresses many ideas on the subject of the mediaeval romance in general that reappear again and again, particularly in the essay on Romance written in 1823 for the Encyclopaedia Britannica.  Among these general ideas that found frequent expression in his critical writings, one which in the light of his creative work becomes particularly interesting to us is his judgment on the distinctions between metrical and prose romances.  He always preferred the poems, though he was so interested in the prose stories that he talked about them with much enthusiasm, and it sometimes seems as if he liked best the kind he happened to be analyzing at the moment.

Other matters that necessarily presented themselves when he was treating the subject of romance were the problem of the sources of narrative material, especially the perplexed question concerning the development of the Arthurian cycle, and the problem, already discussed in connection with ballads, concerning the character of minstrels.  The minstrels reappear throughout Scott’s studies in mediaeval literature, and were perhaps more interesting to him than any other part of the subject.  Though, as we have seen, he formulated a compromise between the opposing opinions of Percy and Ritson, no one who reads the description of the Last Minstrel can doubt what was the picture that he preferred to carry in his mind.

His ideas on the subject of the origin and diffusion of narrative material were those of the sensible man trying to look at the matter in a reasonable way.  Here again he adopted an attitude of compromise, in that he admitted the partial truth of various theories which he considered erroneous only in so far as any one of them was stretched beyond its proper compass.  “Romance,” he said, “was like a compound metal, derived from various mines, and in the different specimens of which one metal or other was alternately predominant."[86]