"I have the misfortune to think differently from you--in my humble opinion, Walter Scott's _sense_ is a still more wonderful thing than his _genius_." Indeed I have no sort of doubt that, long before 1818, full justice was done to Scott, even in these minor things, by all those of his Edinburgh acquaintance, whether Whig or Tory, on whose personal opinion he could have been supposed to set much value. With few exceptions, the really able lawyers of his own or nearly similar standing had ere that time attained stations of judicial dignity, or were in the springtide of practice; and in either case they were likely to consider general society much in his own fashion, as the joyous relaxation of life, rather than the theatre of exertion and display. Their tables were elegantly, some of them sumptuously spread; and they lived in a pretty constant interchange of entertainments upon a large scale, in every circumstance of which, conversation included, it was their ambition to imitate those voluptuous metropolitan circles, wherein most of them had from time to time mingled, and several of them {p.248} with distinguished success. Among such prosperous gentlemen, like himself past the _mezzo cammin_, Scott's picturesque anecdotes, rich easy humor, and gay involuntary glances of mother-wit, were, it is not difficult to suppose, appreciated above contributions of a more ambitious stamp; and no doubt his London _réputation de salon_ (which had by degrees risen to a high pitch, although he cared nothing for it) was not without its effect in Edinburgh. But still the old prejudice lingered on in the general opinion of the place, especially among the smart praters of _the Outer-House_, whose glimpses of the social habits of their superiors were likely to be rare, and their gall-bladders to be more distended than their purses. In truth, it was impossible to listen to Scott's oral narrations, whether gay or serious, or to the felicitous fun with which he parried absurdities of all sorts, without discovering better qualities in his talk than _wit_--and of a higher order; I mean especially a power of _vivid painting_--the true and primary sense of what is called _Imagination_. He was like Jaques--though not a "Melancholy Jaques;" and "moralized" a common topic "into a thousand similitudes." Shakespeare and the banished Duke would have found him "full of matter." He disliked mere disquisitions in Edinburgh, and prepared _impromptus_ in London; and puzzled the promoters of such things sometimes by placid silence, sometimes by broad merriment. To such men he seemed _commonplace_--not so to the most dexterous masters in what was to some of them almost a science; not so to Rose, Hallam, Moore, or Rogers,--to Ellis, Mackintosh, Croker, or Canning.