Now and then in his latest diaries--the diaries written in his deep affliction--he comes near the edge of it.

Once, for instance, he says, "What a strange scene if the surge of conversation could suddenly ebb like the tide, and show us the state of people's real minds! 'No eyes the rocks discover Which lurk beneath the deep.' Life could not be endured were it seen in reality." But this is not irony, only the sort of meditation which, in a mind inclined to thrust deep into the secrets of life's paradoxes, is apt to lead to irony.
Scott, however, does not thrust deep in this direction.

He met the cold steel which inflicts the deepest interior wounds, like a soldier, and never seems to have meditated on the higher paradoxes of life till reason reeled.

The irony of Hamlet is far from Scott.

His imagination was essentially one of distinct embodiment.