Errors of judgment appear in places; sometimes they are due to the imperfect scholarship of the time; sometimes they arise from prejudices of Scott's own. In the very first chapter we find him condemning Lyly and all writers of "conceited" language--particularly of course the Metaphysicals--with a thoroughness that a truly catholic critic ought probably to avoid. Scott had a constitutional dislike for a labored style, and at the same time a fondness for the direct and straightforward way of looking at things. So, though he was open to the emotional appeal of a poem like _Christabel_, he took no pleasure in the devious processes by which the cold intellect has sometimes tried to give fresh interest to familiar words and ideas. They quite prevented him from seeing the passion in the work of Donne, for example, and he considered all metaphysical poets, in so far as they showed the traits of their class, to be without poetical feeling. Scott placed Dryden after Shakspere and Milton as third in the list of English writers. I think he would even have been willing to say that Dryden was the third as a poet. For greatly as he admired Chaucer, Scott did not feel Chaucer's full power, and indeed it was only beginning to be possible to read Chaucer with any appreciation of his metrical excellence. Spenser, of whom he once wrote: "No author, perhaps, ever possessed and combined in so brilliant a degree the requisite qualities of a poet,"[167] was more of a favorite with Scott than Chaucer. But at another time he spoke of Drayton as possessing perhaps equal powers of poetry,[168] and he seems to have felt that Spenser becomes tedious through the continued use of his difficult stanza and even more because of the "languor of a continued allegory."[169] In comparing his judgments on Spenser and Dryden we may conclude that the critic found more in the later poet of that solid intellectual basis which he emphasizes in characterizing him. "This power of ratiocination," says Scott, "of investigating, discovering, and appreciating that which is really excellent, if accompanied with the necessary command of fanciful illustration and elegant expression, is the most interesting quality which can be possessed by a poet."[170] Again he lays emphasis on Dryden's versatility,--greater, he says, than that of Shakspere and Milton. In _Old Mortality_ Dryden is referred to as "the great High-priest of all the Nine." Scott would have called this another point of his superiority over Spenser, if he had made the comparison.