scenery of The Lady of the Lake, and heard from old men such stories of the Highlands as formed the groundwork of many of his novels. He took up German, which at that time meant Romance and Poetry, and in 1795 made his translation of Bürger's Lenore, the ballad of terror and wonder. Later, he translated Goethe's adventurous drama of Goetz of the Iron Hand (1799). Foreign romance and historical fiction doubtless helped him to find his way among his own subjects, the mingled likeness and difference of the German work quickening (if that were possible) his interest in kindred themes at home, such as True Thomas or Kinmont Willie, and encouraging him to think of modern renderings on his own account. For a time he was strongly affected by the German manner, not to his advantage, and indulged in horrors written at the request of Mr Lewis,' and too like Mr Lewis's own productions. A disappointment in love, referred to long afterwards in Scott's Journal, was at the time kept to himself; it was not his habit to complain. After his marriage to Miss Charpentier in 1797 he had many years of prosperity before him, making himself known as 'the hardest worker and the heartiest player,' and steadily going on with his poetry, then with his novels; at the same time carrying on all sorts of historical and antiquarian researches, besides miscellaneous literary work by the way, not to speak of his duties as Sheriff of Selkirk and (after 1806) as Clerk of Session. He had also a commission in the Edinburgh Light Horse (a yeomanry regiment, and did not neglect his military calling. The Lay of the Last Minstrel was published in 1805. It followed close upon the Border Minstrelsy (1802-3) and the edition of the old rhyming romance Sir Tristrem (1804), from the famous Auchinleck manuscript, to which Scott was attracted (among other reasons) because it begins with Erceldoune. Scott added some stanzas of his own in the old language, the original of Sir Tristrem having lost its proper ending. After this antiquarian work came the Lay, Marmion, and their successors, down to the year 1814, when The Lord of the Isles closed the series and another order of romance was founded in Waverley. Neither the poems nor the novels kept him fully occupied even in the time that he gave to literature, which was no means the whole of his life. His edition of Dryden, which appeared in the same year as Marmion (1808), might have served any ordinary man of letters for a long task; that book, with its admirable biography and its rich historical notes, was followed by an edition of Swift, and by innumerable miscellaneous articles and reviews, without hindering the poems or the novels. Very few people could make out how he worked; his visitors never knew that he was working at all.

Scott moved from Ashestiel in 1812 to a place lower down the Tweed near Melrose, where he built the house he called Abbotsford. His reputa

tion, wealth, and power of mind went on increasing together. His health was not always good: the Bride of Lammermoor was composed in pain so great, and with such an effort, that the author's mind refused to remember the story afterwards; the opera of Ivanhoe in Paris amused him by recalling the distressing conditions (cramp in the stomach) in which the novel had been put together. But his strength seemed inexhaustible; he had sons and daughters and many friends, and the affection of all who knew him. Beyond American tourists and literary ladies there were few grievances. In 1822, at the king's visit to Edinburgh, Scott, who had been made a baronet in 1820, found himself the representative of his country, as well as his town, by a kind of general consent: every one knew that he was the greatest man there.

In 1826 the reverse came; in his fifty-fifth year, when he was beginning to feel himself no longer young, he was involved in Constable's failure to the amount of £117,000. Shortly before that he had begun to keep a journal, and he continued it-his own story, told without any illusions, sad enough, but never dispirited nor merely pathetic. On the contrary, the humour of Scott is shown nowhere more truly than in the 'Gurnal.'

Between 1826 and 1828 he earned for his creditors nearly £40,000. But he was an old man, before his time; he himself did not reckon on living much over sixty. He had to leave Abbotsford for Naples in September 1831, the day after the expedition to Yarrow along with Wordsworth, who wrote the best memorial of Scott in his poem on that day, and in the verses on Scott's departure: A trouble not of clouds nor weeping rain, Nor of the setting sun's pathetic light Engendered, hangs o'er Eildon's triple height. Spirits of Power assembled there complain For kindred power departing from their sight; While Tweed, best pleased in chanting a blithe strain, Saddens his voice again and yet again.

Lift up your hearts, ye Mourners, for the might
Of the whole world's good wishes with him goes;
Blessings and prayers in nobler retinue
Than sceptred king or laurelled conqueror knows
Follow this wondrous potentate. Be true

Ye winds of ocean, and the midland sea,
Wafting your charge to soft Parthenope!

Scott went first to Malta; at Naples he showed himself still unbeaten, though, as he had told Wordsworth beforehand, he got little good from the beauty of Italy. He was interested in the manuscript of Sir Bevis of Hamtoun at Naples; at Lake Avernus the verse that ran in his head was about Charlie and his men.'

He spent a short time in Rome in the spring of 1832; then he came home. On the 21st of September he died at Abbotsford. Goethe had died earlier in the same year, a much older man.

Scott's poetry, at any rate the common form of his tales in verse, was well described, some years

Scott's narrative style, or of the difference between his plain, straightforward method and that of the great tragic poets. What is wanting in the passage quoted is something that did not suit the writer's purpose at the time. For a comparison of the poems with the Waverley Novels it was expedient to take what might be called ordinary passages from both; not the exceptional things in either. But it is in the large number of exceptions to his ordinary style that Scott shows his quality as a poet, especially in the songs and lyrical poems, of which there is a great variety. Scott gave way to Byron in poetry. 'I gave over writing romances because Byron beat me. He hits the mark where I don't even pretend to fledge my arrow. He has access to a stream of sentiment unknown to me.' The public generally accepted this view, and preferred the Giaour and its successors to Marmion and the Lady of the Lake. Neither Scott nor Byron nor their readers seem to have known the value of Scott's lyrical poetry. His songs are as distinct in quality as Shakespeare's, and Byron had no access to the sources of their music. Some of them, like the songs of Burns, are founded on the Scottish tradition of popular songs, and take up old phrases and rhythms:

He turned his charger as he spake
Upon the river shore.

'0 Brignall banks are fresh and fair' was prob-
ably suggested by the verse of 'Bothwell banks,'
which the traveller in Palestine, long before, heard
sung by a woman to her child-the beautiful story
is told by Scott in the Minstrelsy. Scott, like
Burns, had his own way of dealing with these
suggestions, and the best of his lyrics are in the
poet's own style, as clearly as those of Keats or
Shelley. They also have in them the magic that
is found so seldom in the course of Scott's narra-
tive verse.
Proud Maisie and County Guy are

as different from the narrative verse as from the prose of the novels. They belong, as the Ettrick Shepherd put it (in speaking of his own poetry compared with Scott's), to a far higher order.' 'Dear Sir Walter, ye can never suppose that I belang to your school o' chivalry! Ye are king of that school, but I'm the king o' the mountain and fairy school, which is a far higher ane nor yours. Hogg, whatever his manners may have been, had a sense of the difference between picturesque romance like Marmion and the kind that will not bear strong lights or definite language, that is all vague-a thing of dreams. He was right also in feeling the want of this 'fine fabling' in Scott's tales. But the songs are different, and claim their place in that kingdom of fantasy which the author of Kilmeny asserted for himself, in which the true queen is La Belle Dame sans Mercy.

Besides these, which are the essential part of Scott's poetry, there are other songs of a different and less exacting kind, like Jock o' Hazeldean and

Donald Caird, and the noble lyrics in the oldfashioned reflective style of the eighteenth century, recitative rather than lyrical-the poems of the Ettrick sunset, 'The Sun upon the Weirdlaw Hill,' and Rebecca's hymn, 'When Israel of the Lord beloved.' Scott professed no great care for the niceties of verse, and took small interest in the run of syllables and the other technical details that Dryden was so fond of. But, careless as he might be, he had the gift of verse, and struck out harmonies such as many weaker poets have laboured hard for:

There rose the choral hymn of praise,

And trump and timbrel answered keen. This is a different kind of lyric poetry from County Guy, but it has a rank of its own, and an honourable one; much of Johnson's verse belongs to the same kind, serious and dignified, and there is one other poem of Scott's there also, the quatrain in which his work is summed up, the utterance of almost his whole heart :

Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife!
To all the sensual world proclaim,
One crowded hour of glorious life

Is worth an age without a name.

Many of the shorter poems were written after the tales in verse had been given up. Scott's poetical genius did not fail when he took to prose for story-telling.

The tales themselves were hardly treated by their author, and in yielding to Byron he gave his own work less than its due. There was more of passion in Byron, but he could not tell a story like Scott. William of Deloraine and Roderick Dhu are stronger in adventures than The Corsair. The Corsair may be better at getting sympathy from his readers; but one cannot be always giving sympathy, whereas a large number of people can always be found to listen to stories of adventure even when the hero is wanting in the passionate attractions of Conrad.

The battle passages, especially Flodden in Marmion and the battle of Beal' an Duine in the Lady of the Lake, have a sound and swell in them beyond the ordinary tone of the stories. This is heard not less plainly in some of the shorter poems:

Dark Morton, girt with many a spear,
Murder's foul minion, led the van,

And clash'd their broadswords in the rear The wild Macfarlane's plaided clan. How much of Scott's war-songs may have gone to fortify the old ballads in the Minstrelsy is hard to say. There is something of him in Kinmont Willie; and though his confessed additions to the Minstrelsy are inferior to that heroic poem, he wrote, later, the ballad of the Harlaw:

What wouldst thou do, my squire so gay,
That rides beside my reyne,
Were ye Glenallan's Earl the day
And I were Roland Cheyne?

This is nearer the old style than the Eve of St John or Glenfinlas, and it is better poetry. It is also different from the style of the Lay and Marmion. The ballad is essentially unlike the long romance, however much in common the two kinds may have in their matter and their morals.

The great want in the verse romances, Marmion and the rest, compared with the novels, is in their drama. Good stories as they are, they bring out only a small part of Scott's strength. It was not till he began his prose stories that he made his people talk. The dialogue in the poems is mostly conventional and rhetorical. Roderick wants the idiom of Rob Roy; he is a romantic personage, but he is not a character as Rob Roy is. Scott put much of his knowledge and his local sympathies into the Lay; it takes in most of the Border country, but it could not give the accent like Dandie Dinmont.

The Waverley Novels made their fortune as historical romances. What was first of all attractive in them was what had given most pleasure in the poems earlier: the scenery, dresses, adventures, everything picturesque' in them, as that term was generally understood. Gilpin, an authority on the Picturesque, had pointed out that there was a common confusion between 'picturesque' and 'romantic;' but the confusion was not abolished by his explanation of the terms, and the inaccurate word is useful in describing the literary taste of the age. Scott, in fact, was admired at first for the sort of decoration which his imitators learned to supply equally well, and for the battles, duels, escapes, disguises, which were more difficult to imitate rightly. There is no doubt about his success; the most grudging of Scott's critics have borne witness most freely, like Hazlitt and Stendhal. The latter of these, while depreciating the machinery of the historical novel in comparison with the novel of character and sentiment, makes no attempt to lessen Scott's popular fame. He, not Byron, is the chief of the romantics.' He has all the 'translators by the yard' scrambling for his books at Madrid, Stuttgart, Paris, and Vienna-a proof that he has 'divined the moral tendencies of his epoch.' What no foreign reader saw, and many English readers missed, was the absolute difference between different parts of the novels. Not every one distinguished what Scott himself called 'the big bow-wow strain' from the speeches in character, the idiomatic conversations. Scott's plan of working was generally casual; he did not think much about his stories, and he had many resources in his memory, besides his fluent style, to help him through his morning's task. But his imagination was roused when it was most wanted, and he found in prose an opening for dramatic work, especially for comedy, such as Marmion and Rokeby had never afforded him. Dandie Dinmont, Mr Oldbuck, Edie Ochiltree, Andrew Fairservice, the Bailie, Caleb Balderstone, Cuddie Headrigg and his mother, are only a few of the

chief characters, and it is their talk that makes the greatness of Scott as a novelist. Stendhal was right about the historical trappings. The pageantry of Ivanhoe and Kenilworth was learned and repeated, like a lesson, by professional novelists, East and West, till the wearied reader would almost have turned, like Niebuhr, to Josephus for recreation. It was not so easy to imitate the other things, except by a share of Scott's genius. Scenes like the beginning of the Antiquary, the drama of the slow coach and the start for Queensferry, are to be copied, like Hamlet, by 'those who have the mind.' But the imitators, as happened with Chaucer also, generally repeated the least characteristic things in their master, the conventional framework and decorations, and made a living that way. But the real excellence of Scott is in the dramatic dialogue.

Sometimes there are curious discrepancies in Scott; inequalities and incongruities, of which the most obvious is in Rob Roy, in the conversation of the Bailie with Helen MacGregor. The two characters are not in the same world: the Bailie is alive; the wife of Rob Roy has no language but that of rhetoric. There is the same sort of thing in Shakespeare: only in Shakespeare the mere rhetoric is usually kept in its place-he does not produce one of his humorous characters talking, at the front of the stage, with one of the rhetorical personages; or if he does, the rhetoric is for the time modified.

Scott's style has been severely treated by many critics, and it has become permissible to speak of his carelessness, his slipshod grammar, and so forth. But there is no way of summing up the qualities of Scott's style in prose or verse, because in both he has many varieties. There is a common, plain manner, fluent and clear, in his prose as in his verse; there are also passages in his prose as distinct from this as his lyrics from his narrative poetry, and fortunately in much greater profusion. Wandering Willie's tale in Redgauntlet is the most famous of these, a story in which the strong and careless writer proves himself inferior to none of the careful artists in composition and elegance of phrasing. The readers of Scott have grown so familiar with his easy methods that they do injustice to his powers of compression, and forget the literary reserve, the concentration of the tragic motive, in the Highland Widow, the Two Drovers, and the story of Elspeth Mucklebackit. Yet it is manifest enough on the face of his writings how his style is quickened to meet the crisis of action; how the leisurely, expository manner that came natural to Scott as a historian is exchanged for another sort of language in such places, for example, as Inveraray Castle in the Legend of Montrose, when Sir Dugald Dalgetty is setting his wits against Argyle.

Scott was treated by Carlyle in the same way as Fielding by Johnson, and almost in the same terms. 'There is as great a difference between

Richardson and Fielding as between a man who knows how a watch is made and a man who can tell the hour by looking on the dial-plate.' Scott imitates the surface of life, says Carlyle; he does not imagine his characters from within. There is the less need to discuss this since Mr Ruskin's praise of Scott in Fors Clavigera, a piece of criticism not easily refuted with regard to dramatic imagination in the Waverley Novels. No analytic novelist ever showed a finer psychological sense than the author who kept two such characters as the Bailie and Andrew Fairservice on the stage at the same time. They belong to the same country, they breathe the same Westland air, they have the same sort of humour in many ways, the same power of evasion and escape when they are asked to commit themselves, the same comfortable sense of their own importance. But they are never allowed to interfere with one another; there is no discord or confusion. The character, the man himself, shines through the humour of Mr Jarvie; there is a grip in his talkative discourse, something of substance and courage. The likeness in garrulous humour does not in the least obscure the difference in character between the honourable man and the churl.

Scott as a leader in the romantic movement, followed by the authors of The Three Musketeers and Notre-Dame de Paris, and many more beyond counting, was never in full sympathy with the ideals of the romantic school, except in the short poems already mentioned. The unrest, the mystery of romance, felt by many poets of that time, was not attractive to Scott. Notably, there was little of the medieval spirit in his study of mediæval literature. He speaks of what Milton might have done for King Arthur, and finds in the books of Lancelot and Tristram a thousand striking Gothic incidents, worthy subjects of the pen of Milton.' What would he not have made of the adventure of the Ruinous Chapel, the Perilous Manor, the Forbidden Seat, the Dolorous Wound, and many others susceptible of being described in the most sublime poetry!' Scott himself does not make anything of these 'Gothic incidents,' and never comes nearer than this to the sources most revered by some other scholars in romance. He loves Froissart; he is not greatly touched by the Quest of the Grail. His mediævalism is generally positive and reasonable; there is great variety in it, great historical interest. But it was not by his antiquities that Scott established his lasting fame. The dialogue in his novels is little in debt to the romantic accessories, except where the problems of an older time give an opportunity for modern character to show itself. Cuddie Headrigg, for example, belongs to the seventeenth century in precisely the same sense as Falstaff to the time of Henry IV. Before either of these humourists the ordinary critical formulas of 'realist' and 'romantic' disappear; they are irrelevant. The injustice from which Scott's reputation has suffered most is that

which assumes his mastery of romantic fiction, and undervalues his triumphs in the more difficult art of comedy.

The Minstrel.

The way was long, the wind was cold,
The minstrel was infirm and old;
His withered cheek, and tresses gray,
Seemed to have known a better day;
The harp, his sole remaining joy,
Was carried by an orphan boy.
The last of all the bards was he
Who sung of Border chivalry;
For, well-a-day! their date was fled;
His tuneful brethren all were dead;
And he, neglected and oppressed,
Wished to be with them, and at rest.
No more, on prancing palfrey borne,
He caroled, light as lark at morn;
No longer, courted and caressed,
High placed in hall, a welcome guest,
He poured, to lord and lady gay,
The unpremeditated lay :

Old times were changed, old manners gone;
A stranger filled the Stuarts' throne;
The bigots of the iron time

Had called his harmless art a crime.
A wandering harper, scorned and poor,
He begged his bread from door to door,
And tuned, to please a peasant's ear,
The harp a king had loved to hear.

(From The Lay of the Last Minstrel) My Native Land.

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,

This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burned,
As home his footsteps he hath turned

From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well:
For him no minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonoured, and unsung.

O Caledonia! stern and wild,
Meet nurse for a poetic child!
Land of brown heath and shaggy wood,
Land of the mountain and the flood,
Land of my sires! what mortal hand
Can e'er untie the filial band

That knits me to thy rugged strand!
Still as I view each well-known scene,
Think what is now, and what hath been,
Seems as, to me, of all bereft,
Sole friends thy woods and streams, were left;
And thus I love them better still,
Even in extremity of ill.

By Yarrow's streams still let me stray,
Though none should guide my feeble way;
Still feel the breeze down Ettrick break,
Although it chill my withered cheek ;