“I am sensible that if there be anything good about my poetry or prose either,” Scott wrote, in a passage that has often been quoted, “it is a hurried frankness of composition which pleases soldiers, sailors and young people of bold and active disposition."[383] I have tried to show that this quality was one which he not only enjoyed, in his own work and in that of other writers, but that as a critic he very seriously approved of it.

Yet in spite of his belief that the greatest literature is not the result of slow and painful labor, it was probably the ease with which he wrote which led him to undervalue his own work.  However we may account for it, he found difficulty in regarding himself as a great author.[384] When this modesty of his came into conflict with the other opinion that he had always been inclined to hold—­that the popularity of books is a test of their merit—­the result is amusing.  He was impelled at times to utter contemptuous words about the foolishness of the public, and of course he could not help being moved also in the other direction—­to believe there was more in his writings than he had realized.  In one mood he said, “I thank God I can write ill enough for the present taste";[385] and “I have very little respect for that dear publicum whom I am doomed to amuse, like Goody Trash in Bartholomew Fair, with rattles and gingerbread; and I should deal very uncandidly with those who may read my confessions were I to say I knew a public worth caring for, or capable of distinguishing the nicer beauties of composition.  They weigh good and evil qualities by the pound.  Get a good name and you may write trash.  Get a bad one and you may write like Homer, without pleasing a single reader."[386] Looking back from the end of his career to the time when The Lady of the Lake was in the height of its success, he wrote:  “It must not be supposed that I was either so ungrateful or so superabundantly candid as to despise or scorn the value of those whose voice had elevated me so much higher than my own opinion told me I deserved.  I felt, on the contrary, the more grateful to the public as receiving that from partiality which I could not have claimed from merit; and I endeavoured to deserve the partiality by continuing such exertions as I was capable of for their amusement."[387] The perfect respectability of these remarks tempts the reader to set over against them this earlier observation by the same writer in the guise of Chrystal Croftangry, “One thing I have learned in life—­never to speak sense when nonsense will answer the purpose as well."[388]