I have had so often to solicit."[311] Similarly he speaks in the preface to Kenilworth of having once been delighted with the poems of Mickle and Langhorne:  “There is a period in youth when the mere power of numbers has a more strong effect on ear and imagination than in after-life.”  With these comments we may put Lockhart’s sagacious remark:  “His propensity to think too well of other men’s works sprung, of course, mainly from his modesty and good nature; but the brilliancy of his imagination greatly sustained the delusion.  It unconsciously gave precision to the trembling outline, and life and warmth to the vapid colours before him."[312] This and his kindness would account for the latter half of the observation made by his publisher:  “I like well Scott’s ain bairns—­but heaven preserve me from those of his fathering."[313]

I have found no reference to Landor, a poet whom Southey and Wordsworth read with eagerness, but Mr. Forster makes this statement in his Biography of Landor:  “Among Landor’s papers I found a list, prepared by himself, of resemblances to passages of his own writing to be found in Scott’s Tales of the Crusaders.  There were several from Gebir....  The poem had made a great impression on Scott, who read it at Southey’s suggestion."[314] Forster also notes the fact that Southey, in a letter to Scott written in 1812, spoke very highly of Landor’s Count Julian.[315] I am similarly unable to cite any comment by Scott on the writings of Lamb.  Was it because Scott’s genius clung to Scotland and Lamb’s to London, that the two seemed so little to notice each other?  It does seem odd that Scott never refers to the delightful Specimens of English Dramatic Poets.  At one time Lamb wrote to Sir Walter asking a contribution toward a fund that was being raised to help William Godwin out of pecuniary troubles, and Scott replied, through the artist Haydon, with a cheque for ten pounds and a pleasant message to Mr. Lamb, “whom I should be happy to see in Scotland, though I have not forgotten his metropolitan preference of houses to rocks, and citizens to wild rustics and highland men."[316] Hazlitt and Hunt were two other writers whose literary work Scott ignored.[317] This, as well as his neglect of Lamb’s and DeQuincey’s essays, may be due largely to the fact that he seldom read newspapers and magazines, and these writers were journalists and contributors to periodicals.  Voracious reader as Scott was, he had to economize time somewhere, and the hours saved from papers could be given to books.  We do find one or two references to these men as political writers.  Scott hoped Lockhart would learn, as editor of the Quarterly, to despise petty adversaries, for “to take notice of such men as Hazlitt and Hunt in the Quarterly would be to introduce them into a world which is scarce conscious of their existence."[318]