The annals of the Scotts were his earliest study, and he developed such an affection for his freebooting grandsires that in his manhood he confessed to an unconquerable liking for the robbers and captains of banditti of his romances, characters who could not be prevented from usurping the place of the heroes.

"I was always a willing listener to tales of broil and battle and hubbub of every kind," he wrote in later life, "and now I look back upon it, I think what a godsend I must have been while a boy to the old Trojans of 1745, nay 1715, who used to frequent my father's house, and who knew as little as I did for what market I was laying up the raw materials of their oft-told tales."[10] What attracted him in his boyhood, and what continued to attract him, was the picturesque incident, the color of the past, the mere look of its varied activity.
The philosophy of history was gradually revealed to him, however, and his generalizing faculty found congenial employment in tracing out the relation of men to movements, of national impulses to world history.

But however much he might exercise his analytical powers, history was never abstract to him, nor did it require an effort for him to conjure up scenes of the past.

An acquaintance with the stores of early literature served to give him the spirit of remote times as well as to feed his literary tastes.

On this side he had an ample equipment for critical work, conditioned, of course, by the other qualities of his mind, which determined how the equipment should be used.
That Scott was not a dull digger in heaps of ancient lore was owing to his imaginative power,--the second of the qualities which we have distinguished as dominating his literary temperament.