Scott practically never rewrote his prose, and the result gave Hazlitt opportunity to say:[367] “We should think the writer could not possibly read the manuscript after he has once written it, or overlook the press."[368] His habit of carrying two trains of thought on together was also responsible for slips in diction and syntax.  An amanuensis working for him noticed this peculiarity, and Scott said in his Journal:  “There must be two currents of ideas going on in my mind at the same time....  I always laugh when I hear people say, Do one thing at once.  I have done a dozen things at once all my life."[369]

But the making of poetry required more attention.  “Verse I write twice, and sometimes three times over,"[370] he said, and one is moved to wonder whether the distaste for writing poetry, that he professed about 1822, arose largely from a growing aversion to what he probably considered extreme care in composition.[371] A series of three comments on his own poetry may be given to illustrate his widely varying moods in regard to it.  They are all taken from letters written not far from the time when Marmion was published.  “As for poetry, it is very little labour to me; indeed ’twere pity of my life should I spend much time on the light and loose sort of poetry which alone I can pretend to write."[372] “I believe no man now alive writes more rapidly than I do (no great recommendation), but I never think of making verses till I have a sufficient stock of poetical ideas to supply them."[373] “If I ever write another poem, I am determined to make every single couplet of it as perfect as my uttermost care and attention can possibly effect."[374] In spite of this momentary resolution to take more pains with his next poem, he was unable to do so when the time came; or if, as in the case of Rokeby he did make the attempt, the results seemed to him unsatisfactory.  Yet verse required much more careful finishing than prose, even when it was written by Scott, and this fact has been too little emphasized in discussions of his transition from verse to prose romances.

Scott’s temperamental aversion to revising what he had once written was evidently sanctioned by his literary creed.  Near the end of his life he recalled how he had submitted one of his earliest poems to the criticism of several acquaintances, with the consequence that after he had adopted their suggestions, hardly a line remained unaltered, and yet the changes failed to satisfy the critics.[375] He said:  “This unexpected result, after about a fortnight’s anxiety, led me to adopt a rule from which I have seldom departed during more than thirty years of literary life.  When a friend whose judgment I respect has decided and upon good advisement told me that a manuscript was worth nothing, or at least possessed no redeeming qualities sufficient to atone for its defects, I have generally cast it aside; but I am little in the custom of paying attention to minute