'Managing his pen with a careless and negligent ease.'

Robert C Gordon's Under Which King? A Study of the Scottish Waverley Novels (1969) doesn't deal with Scott's poems, but it does have some interesting things to say about Scott's relationship with Byron -- which, as you'll remember, we touched on in the lecture.

Sir Walter Scott was a great novelist with a weak aesthetic conscience. He never entirely escaped from a cinviction that writing was a scribblers trade, unworthy of the landed gentleman or the man of business. The magnificence of his successes was a virtue achieved by a powerful imagination working upstream against a current of doubt and prejudice that would have defeated a lesser talent. He once praised Byron, in words that chill, for achieving literary fame whilst "managing his pen with the careless and negligent ease of a man of quality" [MPW iv.375]. It was a justification of literary Whiggery by an appeal to aristocratic principle, a characteristic compliment. [1]

Two questions, then: one, does this seem to you also to apply to the poetry? And two: what does Gordon mean by 'literary Whiggery'?