hesitation, when a troublesome rhyme might be accommodated by an alteration of the stanza, or when an incorrect measure might be remedied by a variation of the rhyme."

Scott has vindicated the meter of his tales as preferable to Pope's couplet, though surely in the case of a romance which was a development of the ballad, the vindication was needless. His meter is the true English counterpart, if there be one, of Homer. And Scott is essentially a ballad writer. Ballad poetry was in literature his first love-the spring at which he drank his earliest inspiration. Each of his greater poems is formed of ballad elements. He himself acknowledged this when he described his earliest considerable poem as, in style and form, a revival of minstrel craft. The great charms of Scott's poetry are simply the characteristics of the old ballads, refined by the influence of modern art and higher culture. Narrative in form and simple in style and language, his poems appeal to the sympathies and the state of knowledge of the mass of the people. They subject the intellect to no violent strain. They are entirely free from subtleties of thought—from intricate subjectivities, remote allusions, and hidden meanings. Their crowning glory is that they are genuine transcripts of nature.

True to his character as a ballad poet, Scott makes large use of the supernatural element. The Augury of the Taghairm, or Oracle of the Hide, in the present poem, the legend of Gilpin Horner in The Lay of the Last Minstrel, and the host's tale of the Elfin Warrior and the apparitions at the City Cross in Marmion are due to the fondness for the purely romantic and supernatural aspects of the ballad which led Scott to translate Bürger's Lenore and Wild Huntsman.

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In this respect Scott bore the impress of his poetical truth; for he is reported to have said of the translation of Lenore by William Taylor: "This was what made me a poet. I had several times attempted the more regular kinds of poetry without success; but here was something that I thought I could do." And accordingly his own translation of that ballad was one of his earliest poetical efforts. But in his larger poems, with the possible exception of The Lay, Scott with the artist's instinct keeps the supernatural element duly subordinate to their primary characteristics narration and description.

The text of this edition is that of Black's Author's Edition, with Rolfe's corrections.

CRITICAL OPINIONS

Surely since Shakespeare's time there has been no great speaker so unconscious of an aim as Sir Walter Scott. Thomas Carlyle.

He saw life, and told the world what he saw. Has any writer since his time supplied it with a fuller, fairer vision? His very style, loose and rambling as it is, is a part of the man, and of the artistic effect he produces. The full vigor and ease with which his imagination plays on life is often suggested by his pleonasms and tautologies; the search for the single final epithet is no part of his method, for he delights in the telling, and is sorry when all is told. Walter Raleigh.

Poetry is consistent with perfect tranquillity of spirit; a true poem may have the calm of a summer day, the placidity of a mountain lake; but eloquence is a torrent, a tempest, a mass in motion, an army with banners, the burst of a hundred instruments of music. Scott's highest excellence as a poet is his eloquence.—John Burroughs.

In Scott's narrative poems the scenery is accessory and subordinate. It is a picturesque background to his figures, a landscape through which the action rushes like a torrent, catching a hint of color perhaps from rock or tree, but never any image so distinct that it tempts us aside to reverie or meditation. —James Russell Lowell.

Walter Scott is a great genius — he has not his equal— and we need not wonder at the extraordinary effect he has produced on the reading world. He gives me much to think of, and I discover in him a wholly new art, with laws of its own.- Goethe.

If there were, or could be, any man whom it would not be a monstrous absurdity to compare with Shakespeare as a creator of men and inventor of circumstance, that man could be none other than Scott. Greater poems than his have been written, and, to my mind, one or two novels better than his best; but when one considers the huge mass of his work, and its quality in the mass, the vast range of his genius, and its command over that range, who shall be compared with him?-A. C. Swin

burne.

Walter Scott is out and away the king of the romantics. The Lady of the Lake has no indisputable claim to be a poem beyond the inherent fitness and desirability of the tale. It is just such a story as a man would make up for himself, walking, in the best of health and temper, through just such scenes as it is laid in. Hence it is that a charm dwells undefinable among these slovenly verses as the unseen cuckoo fills the mountains with his note; hence, even after we have flung the book aside, the scenery and adventures remain present to the mind, a new and green possession, not unworthy of that beautiful name, The Lady of the Lake, or the direct romantic opening, one of the most spirited and poetical in literature, "The stag at eve had drunk his fill."— Robert Louis Stevenson.

He is not a reflective poet, straining his sight to behold what is hidden from men, and laboring to discover the

secret springs of human thought, character, and conduct. No man is less speculative. He is content with broad, obvious surfaces, colors, sounds. He gives us no deep thoughts, few really magical cadences, no trimmed and polished art. He is at the opposite pole from Virgil, but he is, except in his lack of reflection, very closely akin to a greater than Virgil, to Homer. He is, and he is likely to remain, the Latest Minstrel, the last voice of the Old World; akin to Homer, and more akin to Homer's bards, Phemius and Demodocus. The deeds, not the thoughts, of men are his matter; passion expressed in action, not passions analyzed in the poetic laboratory. So potent was his genius, so inspiring the martial tramp and clang of his measures, that he made the New World listen to the accents of the Old.- Andrew Lang.

If Byron and Scott could have been combined, if the energetic passions of the one could have been joined to the healthy nature and quick sympathies of the other, we might have seen another Shakespeare in the nineteenth century. Leslie Stephen.

Probably no author of the highest mark has been so little conscious of his greatness as Scott. His amazing success left the manly simplicity of his nature untouched. His warmth of affection for homely folk, his pleasures and his duties, his gentleness and his courtesy, - he was a gentleman, it was said, even to his dogs, affected by the popularity that made his name everywhere familiar. Whatever was lovely and of good report was loved by him, and the stamp of a healthy nature is left upon all that he has written. - John Dennis.

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Far-seeing toleration, profound reverence, a critical insight into the various shades of thought and feeling, a