ABSTRACT
Sir Walter Scott’s predicament, allowance made for the difference between very great genius and very considerable talent, was much the same as Buchan’s; and Buchan’s study of him is therefore in essence an apologia for the senior partner in the Lord Tweedsmuir-John Buchan combination, an attempt to demonstrate that a great position in the world lays on a poet who is also a man the duty to sacrifice his intellectual and imaginative integrity to its attainment. Scott, says Buchan, never lost himself in the stuffy parlours of self-conscious art; he was a minstrel in the ancient pattern, and it was his business to capture popular favour and give the world what it wanted. Scott, says Buchan, had not the metaphysical turn of his countrymen.
