did so merely because Scott had declined on something
nearer their own standard of what poetry should be.
The lyrics scattered here and there, however, are among
his best, and his buccanier, at least, is immeasurably
more a man of flesh and blood than Byron's moody and
melodramatic corsairs. "He is within the keeping of
Nature," as Scott wrote to Miss Baillie. "The book has
gone off very bobbishly," says Scott to Mr. Morritt. But
the success was not what it had been: the poem was a
worse poem, the public was sated by imitations, and
Childe Harold had taken the world by storm.
Bridal of Triermain, that humorous attempt on critical
acuteness, was very well received; and the normal and
natural mistakes were made by reviewers. A small part
of it at first appeared, with other parodies by Scott, in
the Inferno of Altesidora. A writer in Blackwood (1817)
points out that the original portion is really much more an
imitation of Coleridge. There may have been a change of
purpose, during the construction of this elegant trifle, where
Scott is only quite himself in the ringing Border lines:

Bewcastle now must keep the hold,
Speir-Adam's steeds must bide in stall.

The

an

Of Don Roderick little need be said; it is 66 occasional poem," written for a charitable purpose. Scott was, finally, "clear of The Lord of the Isles" (a piece long contemplated, and prepared for) in January 1815, and two months later Guy Mannering came out, "the work of six weeks at Christmas time." The poem was concluded "unwillingly, and in haste," and in sadness caused by the death of the beautiful Duchess of Buccleuch. The result, as regards the public favour, was comparative disappointment. From Scott, on Bruce, more was expected than was received. Perhaps from early and happy memories of Inninmore,

And green Loch Alline's woodland shore,

and the paradise of Ardtornish, the present writer has a strong partiality for the poem in which these delightful scenes are commemorated, with their ruined castles,

Each on its own dark cape reclined,
And listening to its own wild wind.

The versification returns to the bright variety of the

Lay:

And Morven's echoes answer well,

And Duart hears the distant swell
Come down the darksome Sound.

The description of the "sea-fire" is beautiful, and best to be appreciated by those who know its lambent light on the "darksome Sound" of Mull. Whether taken as a study of Bruce, or as illustrious for the knightly chivalry of the fight at Bannockburn, and the glorious death of Argentine, "charging an army there" alonelike Keppoch at Culloden-The Lord of the Isles seems eminently worthy of the author of Marmion. The private novel of the affections, which meanders through the real interest of the piece, is, not unfortunately, the last of such essays by Scott in a bastard and hopeless genre. Scott withdrew from the field of narrative poetry before Byron, never being able to see, through the dazzling glamour of his generosity, what Lockhart saw plainly enough, that "Byron owed at least half his success to clever, though perhaps unconscious, imitation of himself." Byron, for his part, showed scarcely less generosity. Scott, he says, only ceased to be popular, "because the vulgar learned were tired of hearing 'Aristides called the Just,' and Scott the Best, and ostracised him." His "Waterloo," published for a patriotic purpose, had a temporary vogue, in spite of epigrams,

But none, by sabre or by shot,

Fell half so flat as Walter Scott.

His cavalry charge is brilliant, his simile of the torrent, applied to Napoleon, is original, and deserves the praise of Lockhart. The taunt levelled against the emperor for not doing what neither Charles I. did at his last fight, nor Prince Charles at Culloden-for not heading a hopeless charge and dying sword in hand- -seems less than generous. Napoleon was outworn with a painful malady; he was not, physically, the man of the Bridge of Lodi; and, while he had life, he had faith in his star; he did not die like Catiline monarchs rarely do. At Waterloo, England. and Prussia defeated but a shadow of the Napoleon that once had been, and "God will have a stroke in every battle."

Great as a narrative poet, always rising with his theme, Scott is greater as a lyrist. He had still to pour forth, in his novels, his best songs-joyous, musical, strange, or wild with the madness of Meg Merrilies; it was when he had long left the companionship of the Muse that he made his one moan of self-pity, in "The sun upon the Weirdlaw Hill"; it was when another would have been crushed by labour and anxiety that he wrote the immortal cavalier chant of "Bonnie Dundee" (Dec. 22, 1825) and the song of Wildrake

Here's to honour and faith,

And a health to King Charles !

Yet, in the year of Woodstock, and of his ruin, when he recovered his old verve in "Bonnie Dundee," he says, "Can't say what made me take a frisk so uncommon of late years, as to write verses of free-will." Not precisely of free-will, perhaps, but from the kind constraint of good feeling, he wrote "Glengarry's DeathSong" (1828), published for the first time in Blackwood's (Sept. 1893). In his very latest days at Rome, when he had nothing left, he says, but to be good-natured, he penned for a Russian lady's album the lines which have since been printed from a rough draught, picked up and treasured by his valet. They show the old love of native land, and have something of the old melody. But

Alas, the warped and broken board,
How can it bear the painter's dye?
The harp of strain'd and tuneless chord,
How to the minstrel's hand reply?

There is but a melancholy interest in such final essays; they belong rather to the biography than to the poetry of Scott. As late as the writing of The Fair Maid of Perth, which contains a beautiful dirge, and as beautiful a cradle-song, with the ditty of poor Louise, the harp was not unstrung, but the minstrel rarely handled the instrument.

Were but one fragment of all Scott's poetry left, had the rest perished, like Sappho's, in the changes of things, and were the surviving fragment "Proud Maisie," enough would endure to give the world assurance of a great poet. But that marvellous gem, bright as spring and youth,

Of

and sad as death, would tell us little about the poet's predominant qualities. Among his pieces it is the most inspired, and, consequently, has least of his ordinary self. If, again, nothing was left to us but Elspeth's ballad of the Red Harlaw, we could be assured of the existence of the very greatest of ballad poets. "Nora's Vow" and "Jock of Hazeldean," once more, reveal to us one who is what Praed might have been, had Praed been a Scot and a poet. The woodland lyrics of Rokeby show us Scott in his happiest normal mood-full of the joy of Nature, and the thought of a free roving life. The snatches of Madge Wildfire place him on a level with the Shakspeare who created Ophelia. Thus various is the Muse of the great writer who was so limited, as a lyrist, by the very nobility and selflessness of his character. his own passions and pains, of his love and grief and joy, he simply will not sing, yet these experiences are the staple of the lyrist. We cannot imagine an elegiac Scott: from him no In Memoriam was to be looked for, and he never unlocks his heart, like Shakspeare, with the key of the sonnet. His most intimate emotions are to him too sacred for public utterance; or again he takes Montaigne's advice to "make no great marvel of our own fortunes," and so he never produces himself as his theme. There was no such reticence in Byron, in Shelley, in Tennyson, in Burns. Their hearts were worn on their sleeves, fortunately for lovers of poetry; not so was Scott's. Probably he had not much sympathy with poetical exposures of the self: he remarks that, of Italian poets, Ariosto was always his favourite, and he scarcely hides his contempt for Petrarch and those who "Petrarchise." These ideas rather increase our sympathy for the man; they necessarily limit the poet, and the public vogue of the poet.

Contemporary with Scott, and in the generations that followed Scott, were great writers in all respects unlike him. There was the contemplative Wordsworth, a mystic, though a patriot and a very honest man; there was the inspired Coleridge, with his wonderful year of magic unapproachable; there was Shelley, "the meteoric poet," all air and fire; there was Keats, with the subtlest sense of beauty, stripping Nature to her inmost secret of loveli

ness, as his friend, John Hamilton Reynolds, bids us strip a rosebud to its delicate central petals. All these, with the Virgilian genius of Tennyson, had the supreme command of the mystery of words; form and thought are at one with them, and combine to produce an incommunicable and inexplicable pleasure in the reader. But in Scott the spell is wrought less mystically, by sheer high heart and gallant spirit, by pure delight in what is honest, loyal, fair, heroic, and of good report. In hills and woods and streams he finds nothing "far more deeply interfused," no message from the informing soul of the world, but he is inspired by the manifest, obvious, outward beauty, and by memories of old loves, wars, feuds, and forays. Just as the great world puts away childish things, and plunges into the conflict for actual existence, Scott is born to remember and revive all the things of the world's youth-lady, knight, and dwarf, magician and warrior. Each poet makes his own paradise and place apart; Scott's is a paradise of loyal memories. Exactly like Homer, he lives in the enchanted heroic past he reverts to a taste primitive and, as we fondly hope, essentially immortal. He is like the Fijian story-tellers, who "seek to entertain the chiefs," as one of them says. "These will tell of gods and giants, and canoes greater than the mountains, and of women fairer than the women of these days, and of doings so strange that the jaws of the listener fall apart. Such an one gains great honour." 1

"Great honour" Scott won, and great nambu (poetic reward), and renown he is never likely to lose, though taste varies with the times. Love, too, he has won from all men of heart; in his latest volume Lord Tennyson paid his brief and pregnant tribute to the dead magician. Scott's narrative poems, despite the reckless style and the inherent, inevitable defects of the love-novel in rhyme, are probably even now more read than any other long narrative poems in the language. One of Scott's friends remarked that of all tales in verse the Odyssey was the only one which he would not have preferred in prose. For the Lay, at least, another exception must be made, even by the most fastidious, though it is undeniable

1 Basil Thomson, South-Sea Yarns, p. 11. London, 1894.