From quite different starting points, Landor, the Lake Poets and Southey came very close to the romantic literary form that was the natural, logical development of the tendencies described in chapter 2. All these poets, however, failed to achieve the breakthrough to the popular romance, for reasons we attempted to define in the section on early forms. It was Scott, finally, who was successful, and who was predestined as no other to discover this genre. He had that combination of qualities that was necessary in order to create the type of poetry that was the ‘inevitable’ development of what had gone before: he had a deep personal academic and literary relationship to the world of medieval singers and knights, which had to provide the inspiration for a new type of narrative poetry once classicism had lost its validity. Like the old minstrels, he took naive pleasure in the magic, horror and colourfulness of all ‘romantic’ happenings. He was not so sensitive that he shrank from the savagery of the aggressive world portrayed in the old romances, nor were his tastes so refined that he was repelled by the simple form of most of the old poetry.