Ruskin on Scott's poetry

John Ruskin was one of the nineteenth-century's most widely-read and influential critics and thinkers. He thought highly of Scott's verse ('Scott's poetry,' he write in Modern Painters III:235-6, 'is the saddest I know'), and wrote about it many times. Here, for instance, is his lecture on 'The Poetry of Sir Walter Scott', in which he identifies Scott's chief power as 'word-painting'. We might expect a prominent art critic like Ruskin to see this as a virtue, but do you think that's right? -- I mean, do you think that Scott's visual, painterly qualities are his main achievement?