Scott’s whole attitude toward criticism shows that he felt its supreme function to be elucidation.  It should also, he believed, warn the world against books that were foolish, or pernicious, intellectually or morally; but unless there were good reason for issuing such warnings the bad books should be ignored and the good treated sympathetically, not without such discrimination as should distinguish between the better and the worse in them, but with emphasis on the better.  His literary creed, though not formulated into a system, was conscious and fairly definite; but it consisted of general principles which never resolved themselves into intricate subtleties requiring great space for their development.  Scott could not think in that way, and he felt convinced that such thinking was useless and worse than useless.  A magazine-writer of his own period who said of him,—­“The author of Waverley, we apprehend, has neither the patience nor the disposition requisite for writing philosophically upon any subject,"[469] was mistaken, for much of Scott’s criticism, without making any pretensions, is really philosophical.  But any fine-drawn analysis seemed to him to serve the vanity of the critic rather than the need of the public; and he despised that arrogance in the critic which leads him to assume to direct literary taste.

Historical illustration was that kind of editorial work which he found most congenial, and which harmonized best with his critical principles; for when he could bring definite facts to the service of elucidation he felt that he was doing something worth while.  Among all the introductions and annotations that we have from his hand, including those of the Dryden and the Swift, this kind of explanation greatly predominates over the more strictly literary comment; in his reviews, also, it is evident that he seized every opportunity for turning from literary to historical discussion.  He was in the habit of “embroidering the subject, whatever it might be, with lively anecdotic illustration,"[470] as one of his biographers says.  We are not to conclude that in writing on specifically literary subjects he felt ill at ease.  He felt, on the contrary, that the objection lay in the too great ease with which the critic might become dictatorial.  He was fond enough of details when they were concrete and vital.  The facts of literary history were in this category to him, as distinguished from the notions of literary theory; and we find that his critical principles are apt to appear incidentally among remarks on what seemed to him the more tangible and important facts of literary and social history.  The books he chose to review were chiefly those which gave him a chance to use his historical information and imagination.  His ideas were concrete, as those of a great novelist must inevitably be.  Indeed the dividing line between creative work and criticism seems often to be obliterated in Scott’s literary discussions, since he was inclined to amplify and illustrate instead of dissecting the book under consideration.  As a critic he was distinguished by the qualities which appear in his novels, and which may be described in Hazlitt’s words, as “the most amazing retentiveness of memory, and vividness of conception of what would happen, be seen, and felt by everybody in given circumstances."[471]