His own amiability of course influenced all his work.

Satire he considered objectionable, "a woman's fault,"[22] as he once called it; though he did not feel himself "altogether disqualified for it by nature."[23] "I have refrained, as much as human frailty will permit, from all satirical composition,"[24] he said.

For satire he seems to have substituted that kind of "serious banter, a style hovering between affected gravity and satirical slyness," which has been pointed out as characteristic of him.[25] Washington Irving noticed a similar tone in all his familiar conversations about local traditions and superstitions.[26] He was really optimistic, except on some political questions.

In his _Lives of the Novelists_ he shows that he thought manners and morals had improved in the previous hundred years; and none of his reviews exhibits the feeling so common among men of letters in all ages, that their own times are intellectually degenerate.

It is true that he looked back to the days of Blair, Hume, Adam Smith, Robertson, and Ferguson, as the "golden days of Edinburgh,"[27] but those golden days were no farther away than his own boyhood, and he had felt the exhilaration of the stimulating society which he praised.