much to the exquisiteness of his songs.  “He seems almost to think in music,” Scott said, “the notes and words are so happily suited to each other";[299] and, “it would be a delightful addition to life if T.M. had a cottage within two miles of one."[300] Allan Cunningham was a young protege of Scott whose songs, “Its hame and it’s hame,” and “A wet sheet and a flowing sea,” seemed to him “among the best going."[301] Another poet who received Scott’s good offices was Hogg, whose relations with the greater man are described so vividly and at some points so amusingly by Lockhart.  Scott called him a “wonderful creature for his opportunities."[302]

For the poet Crabbe, Scott, like Byron and Wordsworth,[303] had a steady and high admiration.  In the Sunday evening readings that Lockhart describes as being so pleasant a feature of the life of the family in Edinburgh, Crabbe was perhaps the chief standing resource after Shakspere.[304] His work was particularly recommended to the young people of the family,[305] and when the venerable poet visited the Scotts in 1822, he was received as a man whom they always looked upon as nobly gifted.  Scott once wrote of him:  “I think if he had cultivated the sublime and the pathetic instead of the satirical cast of poetry, he must have stood very high (as indeed he does at any rate) on the list of British poets.  His Sir Eustace Grey and The Hall of Justice indicate prodigious talent."[306] Scott did not like Crabbe’s choice of subjects,[307] but he appreciated the “force and vigour” of a poet whom students of our own day are once more beginning to admire, after a period during which he was practically ignored.

Scott’s very high estimation of Joanna Baillie has already been mentioned.[308] In this case as in many others he was proud and happy in the personal friendship of the writer whose works he admired.  He once wrote to Miss Edgeworth:  “I have always felt the value of having access to persons of talent and genius to be the best part of a literary man’s prerogative."[309] Almost the earliest of the writers for whose friendship Scott felt grateful was Matthew Lewis, famed as the author of The Monk.  Lewis was also something of a poet, and was really helpful to Scott in giving him advice on literary subjects.  Though Scott perceived that Lewis’s talents “would not stand much creaming"[310] he continued to regard him as one who had had high imagination and a “finer ear for rhythm than Byron’s.”

Scott felt that his own taste in respect to poetry became more rigorous as he grew older.  In 1823 in a letter to Miss Baillie he commented on Mrs. Hemans as “somewhat too poetical for my taste—­too many flowers, I mean, and too little fruit—­but that may be the cynical criticism of an elderly gentleman; for it is certain that when I was young I read verses of every kind with infinitely more indulgence, because with more pleasure than I can now do—­the more shame for me now to refuse the complaisance which