The unformed and the cultivated tastes are still at one about Scott.

He holds us yet with his unpremeditated art, his natural qualities of friendliness, of humour, of sympathy.

Even the carelessness with which his earliest and his kindest critics--Ellis, Erskine, and Lady Louisa Stuart--reproached him has not succeeded in killing his work and diminishing his renown.
It is style, as critics remind us, it is perfection of form, no doubt, that secure the permanence of literature; but Scott did not overstate his own defects when he wrote in his Journal (April 22, 1826): "A solecism in point of composition, like a Scotch word, is indifferent to me.

I never learned grammar.

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