to avail themselves of this familiarity, and cannot form vivid pictures
even to themselves of scenes in which they pass their daily lives; and
if they could imagine these, they would need the delicate selective
instinct to guide them in the admission and omission of details, as
well as in the grouping of the images. Let any one try to "copy" the
wife or brother he knows so well,--to make a human image which shall
speak and act so as to impress strangers with a belief in its
truth,--and he will then see that the much-despised reliance on actual
experience is not the mechanical procedure it is believed to be. When
Scott drew Saladin and Ceaur de Lion he did not really display more
imaginative power than when he drew the Mucklebackits, although the
majority of readers would suppose that the one demanded a great effort
of imagination, whereas the other formed part of his familiar
experiences of Scottish life. The mistake here lies in confounding the
sources from which the materials were derived with the plastic power of
forming these materials into images. More conscious effort may have
been devoted to the collection of the materials in the one case than in
the other, but that this has nothing to do with the imaginative power
employed may readily be proved by an analysis of the intellectual
processes of composition. Scott had often been in fishermen's cottages
and heard them talk; from the registered experience of a thousand
details relating to the life of the poor, their feelings and their
thoughts, he gained that material upon which his imagination could
work; in the case of Saladin and Ceaur de Lion he had to gain these
principally through books and his general experience of life; and the
images he formed--the vision he had of Mucklebackit and Saladin--must
be set down to his artistic faculty, not to his experience or erudition.

It has been well said by a very imaginative writer, that "when a poet
floats in the empyrean, and only takes a bird's-eye view of the earth,