WALTER SCOTT
SIR,—Dr. Craig must grow up. A compressed parenthesis of disagreement in a favourable review is
not a proper motive for the exhibition of rage and scorn. Anyway, evidence of Scott's Right-wing sympathies (which nobody has disputed) has nothing whatever to do with my point. I argued that Scott accepted the consequences of Scotland's union with England in a modern commercial world, while at the same time preferring the idea of the past. The evidence for this is overwhelming, both in his novels and in his letters. Dr. Craig is puzzled that if this is so Scott should have written so much about the past. But he is more intelligent than he pretends. He knows very well that those novels in which Scott's imagination was most engaged record the transition from a 'romantic' to a 'modern' Scotland with nostalgia for the former but approval for the latter. 'Gas at Abbotsford' is a convenient symbol for all this, and I invoked it as such.
DAVID The University of 811.1.se.‘. Summer Howe Shaffner, Brighton, SusAct
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