ABSTRACT
A desensitized, sceptical intellect feeds Scotland's 'tendency popular criticism' and confirms a rampant sciolism in a predominantly Presbyterian national culture where 'all are readers and so few are scholars'. There is a deeply inscribed idea in modern literary criticism that Scotland fails to produce full-blown Romantic creativity. Scotland may also provide raw scenic materials for the Wordsworths, John Keats and other touring writers but there are no natives in situ truly utilizing the nation's richly affective natural resources. The increasing relegation from the nineteenth century of Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott and Scotland generally within the definition of Romanticism is initiated through a set of snobbish cultural predispositions vociferously promulgated, in the first instance, by a Scot, John Gibson Lockhart. Class-snobbery is pervasive across Lockhart's biographies of Scotland's two most celebrated writers. Worse, however, is Lockhart's dislocation of crucial works by each of these from their Scottish context and Romantic milieu.
