non-greatness

Updated: August 9, 2026

We will omit this of popularity altogether, and account it as making simply nothing toward Scott's greatness or non-greatness, as an accident, not a quality. Shorn of this falsifying nimbus, and reduced to his own natural dimensions, there remains the reality, Walter Scott, and what we can find in him; to be accounted great, or not great, according to the dialects of men.

- The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III