He conceived that his prefaces might be useful to warn readers against any ill effects that might otherwise result from the reading of the accompanying texts; and our comments on the _Lives of the Novelists_ may fitly close with a quotation which shows the writer's attitude toward the novels and his own criticisms upon them. The passage is taken from the _Life of Bage_. "We did not think it proper to reject the works of so eminent an author from this collection, merely on account of speculative errors.[221] We have done our best to place a mark on these; and as we are far from being of opinion that the youngest and most thoughtless derive their serious opinions from productions of this nature, we leave them for our reader's amusement, trusting that he will remember that a good jest is no argument; that the novelist, like the master of a puppet-show, has his drama under his absolute authority, and shapes the events to favour his own opinions; and that whether the Devil flies away with Punch, or Punch strangles the Devil, forms no real argument as to the comparative power of either one or other, but only indicates the special pleasure of the master of the motion." Scott was deeply in sympathy with the literature of the century within which he was born. To the evidence of his _Swift_ and of the _Lives of the Novelists_ it may be added that he contemplated making a complete edition of Pope, and that he professed to like _London_ and _The Vanity of Human Wishes_ the best of all poems. James Ballantyne said, rather ambiguously, "I think I never saw his countenance more indicative of high admiration than while reciting aloud from those productions."[222] In one of his letters Scott spoke of the "beautiful and feeling verses by Dr. Johnson to the memory of his humble friend Levett, ... which with me, though a tolerably ardent Scotchman, atone for a thousand of his prejudices."[223] Not only did he admire the great biography, but he called Boswell "such a biographer as no man but [Johnson] ever had, or ever deserved to have."[224] But he once said that many of the _Ramblers_ were "little better than a sort of pageant, where trite and obvious maxims are made to swagger in lofty and mystic language, and get some credit only because they are not understood."[225]