In general the romance of his nature is rather taken for granted than insisted on, for there are the poems and the novels to bear witness to that side of his temperament; and the surprising thing is that such an author was a business man, a large landowner, an industrious lawyer.[13] Scott's imaginative sense, which clothed in fine fancies any incident or scene presented, however nakedly, to his view, accounts in part for his notorious tendency to overrate the work of other writers, especially those who wrote stories in any form.

This explanation was hinted at by Sir Walter himself, and formulated by Lockhart; it seems a fairly reasonable way of accounting for a trait that at first appears to indicate only a foolish excess of good-nature.

This rich and active imagination, which Scott brought to bear on everything he read, perhaps explains also his habit of paying little attention to carefully worked out details, and of laying almost exclusive emphasis upon main outlines.
When he was writing his _Life of Napoleon_, he said in his _Journal_: "Better a superficial book which brings well and strikingly together the known and acknowledged facts, than a dull boring narrative, pausing to see further into a mill-stone at every moment than the nature of the mill-stone admits."[14] Probably his high gift of imagination made him a little impatient with the remoter reaches of the analytic faculties.

Any sustained exercise of the pure reason was outside his province, reasonable as he was in everyday affairs.

He preferred to consider facts, and to theorize only so far as was necessary to establish comfortable relations between the facts,--never to the extent of trying to look into the center of a mill-stone.