Excerpt from Sir Walter Scott, as a Critic of LiteratureWith Scotland and with popular poetry any discussion of Sir Walter properly begins. The love Of Scottish minstrelsy first awakened his literary sense, and the stimulus supplied by ballads and romances never lost its force. We may say that the little volumes of ballad chap-books which he collected and bound up before he was a dozen years Old suggested the future editor, as the long poem on the Conquest Of Grenada, which he is said to have written and burned when he was fifteen, fore shadowed the poet and romancer.