Edmund is down :--my life is reft; Let Stanley charge with spur of fire,- Page, squire, or groom, one cup to bring XXX. O, Woman! in our hours of ease, By the light quivering aspen made; Scarce were the piteous accents said, Sees but the dying man. She stoop'd her by the runnel's side,3 Was curdling in the streamlet blue. A little fountain cell, Where water, clear as diamond-spark, Above, some half-worn letters say, Brink. weary. pilgrim. drink. and. pray. A monk supporting Marmion's head: 1 MS.-" Full on King James' central host." "The hero of the piece, Marmion, who has been guilty of seducing a nun, and abandoning her to be buried alive, of forgery to ruin a friend, and of perfidy in endeavouring to seduce away from him the object of his tenderest affections, fights and dies gloriously, and is indebted to the injured Clara for the last drop of water to cool his dying thirst. This last act of disinterested attention extorts from the author the smoothest, sweetest, and tenderest lines in the whole poem. It is with pleasure that we extract numbers so harmonious from the discords by which they are surrounded."—Critical Review. 3 MS." She stoop'd her by the runnel's tide, But in abhorrence soon withdrew, A pious man, whom duty brought XXXI. Deep drank Lord Marmion of the wave, And, as she stoop'd his brow to lave"Is it the hand of Clare," he said, "Or injured Constance, bathes my head?" Then, as remembrance rose,"Speak not to me of shrift or prayer! I must redress her woes. Short space, few words, are mine to spare; Forgive and listen, gentle Clare!"— "Alas!" she said, "the while,O, think of your immortal weal! In vain for Constance is your zeal; She died at Holy Isle.”— Lord Marmion started from the ground, As light as if he felt no wound; Though in the action burst the tide, In torrents, from his wounded side. "Then it was truth," he said—“I knew That the dark presage must be true.— I would the Fiend, to whom belongs The vengeance due to all her wrongs, Would spare me but a day! For wasting fire, and dying groan,^ And priests slain on the altar stone, Might bribe him for delay. It may not be!-this dizzy trance- XXXII. With fruitless labour, Clara bound, For, oozing from the mountains wide Above, some half worn letters say, "In the lost battle, borne down by the flying, Where mingles war's rattle with groans of the dying!" So the notes rung;- O, think on faith and bliss!- And shouted" Victory!— Charge, Chester, charge! On, Stanley, on!" Were the last words of Marmion.3 XXXIII. By this, though deep the evening fell, On Roncesvalles died! Such blast might warn them, not in vain, And round it toils, and bleeds, and dies, In vain the wish-for far away, But as they left the dark'ning heath,5 That fought around their King. But yet, though thick the shafts as snow, Though charging knights like whirlwinds go, Though bill-men ply the ghastly blow, Unbroken was the ring; The stubborn spear-men still made good 6 No thought was there of dastard flight; Till utter darkness closed her wing Then did their loss his foemen know; When streams are swoln and south winds blow, Tweed's echoes heard the ceaseless plash, 1 MS.-"O look, my son, upon this cross, 2 MS." And sparkled in his eye." 3 The Lady of the Lake has nothing so good as the death of Marmion.-MACKINTOSH. 4 MS." In vain the wish-for far they stray, And spoil and havoc mark'd their way. 'O, Lady,' cried the Monk, 'away!"" 5 MS.-" But still upon the darkening heath." MS.-"Ever the stubborn spears made good Their dark impenetrable wood; Each Scot stepp'd where his comrade stood, The instant that he fell, The skilful Surrey's sage commands Drew from the strife his shatter'd bands. Their loss his foeman knew; Their King, their Lords, their mightiest low, They melted from the field as snow, When streams are swoln and south winds blow, To town and tower, to town and dale, Of Flodden's fatal field, Where shiver'd was fair Scotland's spear, And broken was her shield! XXXV. Day dawns upon the mountain's side:-2 That, journeying far on foreign strand, May yet return again. He saw the wreck his rashness wrought; And fell on Flodden plain: Beseem'd the monarch slain.3 But, O! how changed since yon blithe night !- XXXVI. Short is my tale:-Fitz-Eustace' care But, thanks to Heaven and good Saint Chad, "The powerful poetry of these passages can receive no illustration from any praises or observations of ours. It is superior, in our apprehension, to all that this author has hitherto produced; and, with a few faults of diction, equal to any thing that has ever been written upon similar subjects. From the moment the author gets in sight of Flodden field, indeed, to the end of the poem, there is no tame writing, and no intervention of ordinary passages. He does not once flag or grow tedious; and neither stops to describe dresses and ceremonies, nor to commemorate the harsh names of feudal barons from the Border. There is a flight of five or six hundred lines, in short, in which he never stoops his wing, nor wavers in his course; but carries the reader forward with a more rapid, sustained, and lofty movement, than any epic bard that we can at present remember."-JEFFREY. There erst was martial Marmion found, His arms and feats were blazed. And yet, though all was carved so fair, And priest for Marmion breathed the prayer, The last Lord Marmion lay not there. From Ettrick woods a peasant swain Follow'd his lord to Flodden plain,— One of those flowers, whom plaintive lay In Scotland mourns as "wede away:" Sore wounded, Sybil's Cross he spied, And dragg'd him to its foot, and died, Close by the noble Marmion's side. The spoilers stripp'd and gash'd the slain, And thus their corpses were mista'en; And thus, in the proud Baron's tomb, The lowly woodsman took the room. XXXVII. Less easy task it were, to show And broke her font of stone: And shepherd boys repair To seek the water-flag and rush, And plait their garlands fair; Thou left'st the right path for the wrong; If every devious step, thus trod, Still led thee farther from the road; 2 ་་ Day glimmers on the dying and the dead, 3 See Appendix, Note 4 S. 4 Ibid, Note 4 T. 4"A corpse is afterwards conveyed, as that of Marmion, to the Cathedral of Lichfield, where a magnificent tomb is erected to his memory, and masses are instituted for the repose of his soul; but, by an admirably-imagined act of poetical justice, we are informed that a peasant's body was placed beneath that costly monument, while the haughty Baron himself was buried like a vulgar corpse, on the spot on which he died."-Mon. Rev. 5 MS." They dug his bed e'en where he lay." 6 MS." But yet where swells the little hill." 7 MS." If thou should'st find this little tomb, Beware to speak a hasty doom." I do not rhyme to that dull elf, That, when brave Surrey's steed was slain, That, after fight, his faith made plain, Paint to her mind the bridal's state; 1 MS.-" He hardest press'd the Scottish ring; 2 Used generally for tale, or discourse. 3" We have dwelt longer on the beauties and defects of this poem, than, we are afraid, will be agreeable either to the partial or the indifferent; not only because we look upon it as a misapplication, in some degree, of very extraordinary talents, but because we cannot help considering it as the foundation of a new school, which may hereafter occasion no little annoyance both to us and to the public. Mr. Scott has hitherto filled the whole stage himself; and the very splendour of his success has probably operated as yet rather to deter than to encourage the herd of rivals and imitators; but if, by the help of the good parts of his poem, he succeeds in suborning the verdict of the public in favour of the bad parts also, and establishes an indiscriminate taste for chivalrous legends and romances in irregular rhyme, he may depend upon having as many copyists as Mrs. Radcliffe or Schiller, and upon becoming the founder of a new schism in the catholic poetical church, for which, in spite of all our exertions, there will probably be no cure, but in the extravagance of the last and lowest of its followers. It is for this reason that we conceive it to be our duty to make one strong effort to bring back the great apostle of the heresy to the wholesome creed of his instructors, and to stop the insurrection before it becomes desperate and senseless, by persuading the leader to return to his duty and allegiance. We admire Mr. Scott's genius as much as any of those who may be misled by its perversion; and, like the curate and the barber in Don Quixote, lament the day when a gentleman of such endowments was corrupted by the wicked tales of knight-errantry and enchantment."-JEFFREY. "We do not flatter ourselves that Mr. Scott will pay to our advice that attention which he has refused to his acute friend Mr. Erskine; but it is possible that his own good sense may in time persuade him not to abandon his loved fairy ground, (a And afterwards, for many a day, That it was held enough to say, In blessing to a wedded pair, "Love they like Wilton and like Clare!" L'Envoy. TO THE READER. WHY then a final note prolong, A garland for the hero's crest, To every lovely lady bright, What can I wish but faithful knight? To every faithful lover too, To thee, dear school-boy, whom my lay And pleasing dreams, and slumbers light!3 province over which we wish him a long and prosperous government,) but to combine the charms of lawful poetry with those of wild and romantic fiction. As the first step to this desirable end, we would beg him to reflect that his Gothic models will not bear him out in transferring the loose and shuffling ballad metre to a poem of considerable length, and of complicated interest like the present. It is a very easy thing to write five hundred ballad verses, stans pede in uno: but Mr. Scott needs not to be told, that five hundred verses written on one foot have a very poor chance for immortality."-Monthly Review. "The story," writes Mr. Southey, "is made of better materials than the Lay, yet they are not so well fitted together. As a whole, it has not pleased me so much-in parts, it has pleased me more. There is nothing so finely conceived in your former poem as the death of Marmion: there is nothing finer in its conception any where. The introductory epistles I did not wish away, because, as poems, they gave me great pleasure; but I wished them at the end of the volume, or at the beginning,-any where except where they were. My taste is perhaps peculiar in disliking all interruptions in narrative poetry. When the poet lets his story sleep, and talks in his own person, it has to me the same sort of unpleasant effect that is produced at the end of an act. You are alive to know what follows, and lo-down comes the curtain, and the fiddlers begin with their abominations. The general opinion, however, is with me, in this particular instance."— Life of Scott, vol. iií. pp. 44. "Thank you," says Mr. Wordsworth, "for Marmion. I think your end has been attained. That it is not the end which I should wish you to propose to yourself, you will be well aware, from what you know of my notions of composi tion, both as to matter and manner. In the circle of my ac quaintance, it seems as well liked as the Lay, though I have heard that in the world it is not so. Had the poem been much better than the Lay, it could scarcely have satisfied the public, which has too much of the monster, the moral monster, in its composition."-Ibid, p. 45. many of the subordinate and connecting parts of the narra tive are flat, harsh, and obscure-but would never make any serious attempt to do away with these imperfections; and perhaps they, after all, heighten by contrast the effect of the passages of high-wrought enthusiasm which alone he considered, in after days, with satisfaction. As for the 'epistolary dissertations,' it must, I take it, be allowed that they interfered with the flow of the story, when readers were turning the leaves with the first ardour of curiosity; and they were not, in fact, originally intended to be interwoven in any fashion with the romance of Marmion. Though the author himself does not allude to, and had perhaps forgotten the circumstance, when writing the Introductory Essay of 1830 "My own opinion," says Mr. George Ellis, “is, that both the productions are equally good in their different ways: yet, upon the whole, I had rather be the author of Marmion than of the Lay, because I think its species of excellence of much more difficult attainment. What degree of bulk may be essentially necessary to the corporeal part of an Epic poem, I know not; but sure I am that the story of Marmion might have furnished twelve books as easily as six-that the masterly character of Constance would not have been less be--they were announced, by an advertisement early in 1807, as witching had it been much more minutely painted-and that De Wilton might have been dilated with great ease, and even to considerable advantage;-in short, that had it been your intention merely to exhibit a spirited romantic story, instead of making that story subservient to the delineation of the manners which prevailed at a certain period of our history, the number and variety of your characters would have suited any scale of painting. On the whole, I can sincerely assure-buoyant, virtuous, happy genius-exulting in its own eneryou, that had I seen Marmion without knowing the author, I should have ranked it with Theodore and Honoria,-that is to say, on the very top shelf of English peotry."—Ibid, vol. iii. p. 46. "I shall not, after so much of and about criticism, say any thing more of Marmion in this place, than that I have always considered it as, on the whole, the greatest of Scott's poems. There is a certain light, easy, virgin charm about the Lay, which we look for in vain through the subsequent volumes of his verse; but the superior strength, and breadth, and boldness, both of conception and execution, in the Marmion, appear to me indisputable. The great blot, the combination of mean felony with so many noble qualities in the character of the hero, was, as the poet says, severely commented on at the time by the most ardent of his early friends, Leyden; but though he admitted the justice of that criticism, he chose 'to let the tree lie as it had fallen.' He was also sensible that Six Epistles from Ettrick Forest,' to be published in a separate volume, similar to that of the Ballads and Lyrical Pieces; and perhaps it might have been better that this first plan had been adhered to. But however that may be, are there any pages, among all he ever wrote, that one would be more sorry he should not have written? They are among the most delicious portraitures that genius ever painted of itself, gies, yet possessed and mastered by a clear, calm, modest mind, and happy only in diffusing happiness around it. "With what gratification those Epistles were read by the friends to whom they were addressed, it would be superfluous to show. He had, in fact, painted them almost as fully as himself; and who might not have been proud to find a place in such a gallery? The tastes and habits of six of those men, in whose intercourse Scott found the greatest pleasure when his fame was approaching its meridian splendour, are thus preserved for posterity; and when I reflect with what avidity we catch at the least hint which seems to afford us a glimpse of the intimate circle of any great poet of former ages, I cannot but believe that posterity would have held this record precious, even had the individuals been in themselves far less remarkable than a Rose, an Ellis, a Heber, a Skene, a Marriott, and an Erskine."-LOCKHART, vol. iii. p. 55. |