I do not believe that in the whole of literature there is a more noble and beautiful document of its kind than the diary of these later years. The simplicity, the sincerity of the man stand out on every page. There are no illusions about himself or his work. He hears that Southey has been speaking of him and his misfortunes with tears, and he says plainly that such tears would be impossible to himself in a parallel case; that his own sympathy has always been practical rather than emotional; his own tendency has been to help rather than to console. Again, speaking of his own writings, he says that he realises that if there is anything good about his poetry or prose, "It is a hurried frankness of composition, which pleases soldiers, sailors, and young people of bold and active disposition." He adds, indeed, a contemptuous touch to the above, which he was great enough to have spared: "I have been no sigher in shades--no writer of Songs and sonnets and rustical roundelays Framed on fancies and whistled on reeds." A few days later, speaking of Thomas Campbell, the poet, he says that "he has suffered by being too careful a corrector of his work." That is a little ungenerous, a little complacent; noble and large as Scott's own unconsidered writings are, he ought to have been aware that methods differ. What, for instance, could be more extraordinary than the contrast between Scott and Wordsworth--Scott with his "You know I don't care a curse about what I write;" and Wordsworth, whose chief reading in later days was his own poetry. Whenever the two are brought into actual juxtaposition, Wordsworth is all pose and self-absorption; Scott all simplicity and disregard of fame. Wordsworth staying at Abbotsford declines to join an expedition of pleasure, and stays at home with his daughter. When the party return, they find Wordsworth sitting and being read to by his daughter, the book his own Excursion. A party of travellers arrive, and Wordsworth steals down to the chaise, to see if there are any of his own volumes among the books they have with them. When the two are together, Scott is all courteous deference; he quotes Wordsworth's poems, he pays him stately compliments, which the bard receives as a matter of course, with stiff, complacent bows. But, during the whole of the time, Wordsworth never lets fall a single syllable from which one could gather that he was aware that his host had ever put pen to paper. Yet, while one desires to shake Wordsworth to get some of his pomposity out of him, one half desires that Scott had felt a little more deeply the dignity of his vocation. One would wish to have infused Wordsworth with a little of Scott's unselfish simplicity, and to have put just a little stiffening into Scott. He ought to have felt--and he did not--that to be a great writer was a more dignified thing than to be a sham seigneur.