Scott’s imaginative sense, which clothed in fine fancies any incident or scene presented, however nakedly, to his view, accounts in part for his notorious tendency to overrate the work of other writers, especially those who wrote stories in any form.  This explanation was hinted at by Sir Walter himself, and formulated by Lockhart; it seems a fairly reasonable way of accounting for a trait that at first appears to indicate only a foolish excess of good-nature.  This rich and active imagination, which Scott brought to bear on everything he read, perhaps explains also his habit of paying little attention to carefully worked out details, and of laying almost exclusive emphasis upon main outlines.  When he was writing his Life of Napoleon, he said in his Journal:  “Better a superficial book which brings well and strikingly together the known and acknowledged facts, than a dull boring narrative, pausing to see further into a mill-stone at every moment than the nature of the mill-stone admits."[14] Probably his high gift of imagination made him a little impatient with the remoter reaches of the analytic faculties.  Any sustained exercise of the pure reason was outside his province, reasonable as he was in everyday affairs.  He preferred to consider facts, and to theorize only so far as was necessary to establish comfortable relations between the facts,—­never to the extent of trying to look into the center of a mill-stone.  It was not unusual for him to make very acute observations in the spheres of ethics, economics, and psychology, and to use them in explaining any situation which might seem to require their assistance; but these remarks were brief and incidental, and bore a very definite relation to the concrete ideas they were meant to illustrate.

Scott was a business man as well as an antiquary and a poet.  Mr. Palgrave thought Lockhart went too far in creating the impression that Scott could detach his mind from the world of imagination and apply its full force to practical affairs.[15] Yet the oversight of lands and accounts and of all ordinary matters was so congenial to him, and his practical activities were on the whole conducted with so much spirit and capability, that after emphasizing his preoccupation with the poetic aspects of the life of his ancestors, we must turn immediately about and lay stress upon his keen judgment in everyday affairs.  To a school-boy poet he once wrote:  “I would ... caution you against an enthusiasm which, while it argues an excellent disposition and a feeling heart, requires to be watched and restrained, though not repressed.  It is apt, if too much indulged, to engender a fastidious contempt for the ordinary business of the world, and gradually to render us unfit for the exercise of the useful and domestic virtues which depend greatly upon our not exalting our feelings above the temper of well-ordered and well-educated society."[16] He phrased the same matter differently when he said:  “’I’d