The editing of Dryden alone would have seemed to most men of leisure a pretty full occupation for these eight years, and though I do not know that Scott edited with the anxious care with which that sort of work is often now prepared, that he went into all the arguments for a doubtful reading with the pains that Mr.Dyce spent on the various readings of Shakespeare, or that Mr.Spedding spent on a various reading of Bacon, yet Scott did his work in a steady, workmanlike manner, which satisfied the most fastidious critics of that day, and he was never, I believe, charged with hurrying or scamping it.

His biographies of Swift and Dryden are plain solid pieces of work--not exactly the works of art which biographies have been made in our day--not comparable to Carlyle's studies of Cromwell or Frederick, or, in point of art, even to the life of John Sterling, but still sensible and interesting, sound in judgment, and animated in style.
FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 24: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ii.

268-9.].