occupied with tramping the surrounding country in search of romance and antiquarian lore. During these years, as always, he was a social favorite, and Scotch whiskey joined with love of excitement sometimes led to a carousal a weakness which his innate manliness soon over

came.

To the Bar. In 1792 he was called to the Bar, practising with fair success for fourteen years. Afterwards he was Clerk of Sessions at Edinburgh and was Sheriff of Selkirkshire from 1799 to the end of his life.

Love and Marriage.

- About two years before his call to the Bar, Scott offered his umbrella, at the door of Greyfriars Church, to a charming young lady. Although the umbrella was returned after the shower, the heart of the lender remained in the hold of the borrower, and for six years Scott hoped for a marriage with her. For some reason this never took place, and the lady eventually married one of his best friends. Within a year he became engaged to Mademoiselle Charpentier, the orphan of a French royalist. She was pretty and lively, and, while far from being her husband's equal, made a loving wife, braver than people expected when adversity swept away their fortune.

First Writings. The romantic revival in Germany fascinated him, and his first writings were translations of German poems, beginning with Bürger's blood-curdling Lenore. Next he edited The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, which he had been collecting since his college excursions into Liddesdale. Eight hundred copies were sold within a year after its publication in 1802, and the

literary world at once recognized the promise of the book.

The Lay of the Last Minstrel. These imitations of old ballads were the prelude to purely original work, and before Cadyow Castle was finished, Scott was already beginning The Lay of the Last Minstrel. The legend of a goblin page suggested by Lady Dalkeith (afterward Duchess of Buccleugh) became the nucleus of a great metrical romance. The author expressed his own chivalrous devotion to his friend by representing her as the Lady of Branksome, and himself as a wandering harper who sings the Lay of her house and the magic powers of his own wizard namesake, Michael Scott. The success of the poem was something marvellous. Although the plot lacks unity, and one is not entirely clear as to the precise doings of either the goblin page or William of Deloraine, there is sufficient charm in the style, the beautiful descriptive passages, and the mediæval flavor.

Marmion. The Lay was followed three years later by Marmion, and before the end of 1815 by The Lady of the Lake, Rokeby, The Bridal of Triermain, The Lord of the Isles, and many lesser poems. Marmion is usually considered the best of all in poetic power and well-balanced, artistic construction. Much of it was composed on horseback, and one feels the gallop of the flying hoofs in its onward rush. The description of the Battle of Flodden Field is by many critics ranked second only to Homer. The Lady of the Lake. The Lady of the Lake appeared in 1810. When one knows that its price was two guineas, about ten dollars, the sale seems incredible

some two

thousand copies within a year after publication. It being just before the excursion season, all Great Britain set off to view the scenery of Loch Katrine, and every innkeeper and coach owner in the Trosachs made his fortune. One person alone suffered. Scott's little son came home from school badly battered and tearful. "Well, Wat," said his father, "what have you been fighting about to-day?" The boy shamefacedly muttered that he had been called a "lassie." "Indeed!" said Mrs. Scott, "this was a terrible mischief, to be sure." "You may say what you please, mamma, but I dinna think there is a waufer [shabbier] thing in the world than to be a lassie, to sit boring at a clout [patch].". It seems that some of his comrades had nicknamed him The Lady of the Lake, and, not knowing the reason, the little fellow had resented the insult, after the manner of his ancestors.

Later Poems. - Rokeby and The Lord of the Isles were received, and deservedly, with much less favor than their more effective predecessors. This fact, combined with the meteoric brilliancy of Lord Byron's appearance in the literary horizon, aroused in Scott the feeling that his poetic vein was exhausted. The charm of novelty having passed, it is probable that he was partially correct in this judgment so far as it concerned his romances in verse. Nevertheless some of his finest work is found in those lyrics which are embedded in the Waverley novels. Among the best of these little gems are County Guy (in Quentin Durward), Rebecca's song (in Ivanhoe), and Proud Maisie. Only one more long poem was pub

lished, and that after five of the prose romances had taken Great Britain by storm. It was unfortunate that Harold the Dauntless should have been forced into comparison with Byron's Childe Harold by the similarity of title, although a part of the former had appeared before its rival.

Place as a Poet.

With this closes the story of Walter Scott the poet. His poetic style we will discuss later in connection with The Lady of the Lake. It has been the fashion often to rank him below his contemporaries, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Whether such will be the decision of the future remains to be determined. Subtle and complex he was not. Wordsworth's mystical communion with nature, Shelley's prophetic vision and lyric music, he had not; neither had he the marvellous command of imagination and rhythm found in Coleridge's fragments, nor the intangible felicity of phrase which draws us to Keats. He lacks Byron's resistless sweep. But was he not Byron's instructor in the metrical romance? And there is a strong sympathy with his brother man; a closeness to nature, in her Scottish haunts at least; a descriptive power often magical; and an unerring sense of that which was most human and most poetic in the past of his native land. When these qualities are combined with the smooth but spirited verse movement, we have a poet who is not far below the mighty. He is termed "the great modern troubadour," and in the poetry of action he has no rival since Shakespeare.

The Waverley Novels. Four years after the publica

tion of The Lady of the Lake, Scott completed a Jacobite story which he had commenced ten years before. This was the first of the twenty-nine romances, on which, even more than on his verse, rests Scott's fame. The popularity of Waverley was instantaneous, and the public never lost its enthusiasm for the successive volumes "by the author of Waverley." Scott did not acknowledge their parentage until 1821, the year that Kenilworth appeared. Still several friends were in the secret, and the disguise was always rather thin. The resemblance. between his style in the novels and that in the prose introductions of the poems is so close, and the tastes shown in both are so similar, that we wonder that there should have been any mystification at all. Indeed, when Guy Mannering came out, James Hogg, the poet, known as the "Ettrick Shepherd," said to Professor Wilson ("Christopher North"): "I have done wi' doubts now. Colonel Mannering is just Walter Scott painted by himself."

In so brief a sketch of the poet Walter Scott, space cannot be spared for more than a glance at the Waverley Novels. There are no better companions for boys and girls, from twelve years old to seventy, than these healthy Scottish folk. Naturally their creator was most at ease in his own country with Waverley, Rob Roy, Guy Mannering, The Bride of Lammermoor, with Jeanie Deans in The Heart of Midlothian, Claverhouse in Old Mortality, and Mary Stuart in The Abbot. And yet could any picture be more vivid than that of Richard the Lionhearted in The Talisman and Ivanhoe, of Louis XI. in