It sifts away what is foreign and alien to his genius, and assimilates what is suited to it.

In his very last days, when he was visiting Italy for the first time, Scott delighted in Malta, for it recalled to him Vertot's _Knights of Malta_, and much, other mediaeval story which he had pored over in his youth.

But when his friends descanted to him at Pozzuoli on the Thermae--commonly called the Temple of Serapis--among the ruins of which he stood, he only remarked that he would believe whatever he was told, "for many of his friends, and particularly Mr.Morritt, had frequently tried to drive classical antiquities, as they are called, into his head, but they had always found his skull too thick." Was it not perhaps some deep literary instinct, like that here indicated, which made him, as a lad, refuse so steadily to learn Greek, and try to prove to his indignant professor that Ariosto was superior to Homer?
Scott afterwards deeply regretted this neglect of Greek; but I cannot help thinking that his regret was misplaced.

Greek literature would have brought before his mind standards of poetry and art which could not but have both deeply impressed and greatly daunted an intellect of so much power; I say both impressed and daunted, because I believe that Scott himself would never have succeeded in studies of a classical kind, while he might--like Goethe perhaps--have been either misled, by admiration for that school, into attempting what was not adapted to his genius, or else disheartened in the work for which his character and ancestry really fitted him.

It has been said that there is a real affinity between Scott and Homer.