Proposed by the Rt. Hon. Stanley Baldwin
At the Annual Dinner of the Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club
Relayed from The North British Station Hotel, Edinburgh
S.B. from Edinburgh

The popular conception of the artist is incorrigibly romantic. Extreme poverty and fantastic wealth are his inevitable lot. If he is a poet, his proper home, of course, is the garret; if he is a novelist, he will, assuredly, in the end, never write a word without receiving therefrom monstrous remuneration. For tho public mind is inevitably more interested in the artist's cheque-book than in his art. Thus it is that Sir Walter Scott, to most of us, still remains the man who made poetry pay - did he not sell twenty thousand copies of The Lady of the Lake in a year? - and the man who later, when hard pressed by creditors who were not really his creditors at all, worked himself literally to death to pay his debts. It is all true enough, but it is not the whole of the picture. There is also the man's poetry itself, and his prose.

Remembering his gigantic sales, we are apt to forget his influence on contemporary life and letters. Few people, when once they have quit schooldays, now read the 'Waverley Novels' with the constancy and devotion that is still lavished, say, on Dickens; and even school-children (we believe) take their Scott by the pinch rather than by the peck. But the place of Scott, for all that, is secure. He wrote too prolifically, perhaps, to have written with consistency; but there is enough pure gold when the dross is taken away, both from his poetry and from his prose, to make his heritage to the English-speaking peoples one of the noblest in our literature. It may be that, as with Tennyson, we are suffering at the moment a too severe reaction. Perhaps Scott has yet to come into his own?