TRESSURE. The ornamented border WIVES. Women (a Scottish use of

QUESTIONS, NOTES, AND SUGGES

TIONS FOR STUDY.

THE PLOT.

As it is difficult to follow and to outline the poem the following prose summary is given in order that you may be intelligently informed concerning the course of events. This summary appeared in the Edinburgh Review, April, 1808, and was written by a famous English critic, Francis Jeffrey, who was a friend of Scott, though not an impartial critic of Scott's poetry. After you have received this assistance in learning the story you should depend on your own efforts, and make your own summary.

"Lord Marmion, the fictitious hero of the poem, was an English knight of great rank, fortune and prowess, in the reign of Henry VIII, and had, some years before the opening of the narrative,

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ried off from her convent, Constance de Beverley, a professed nun of good family, whom he had afterwards retained about his person in the disguise of a page. At the end of three years, however, he falls in love with the fair face or the broad lands of Clara de Clare, a damsel of great merit, whose affections, however, were previously engaged to Ralph De Wilton, a valiant knight in her neighborhood. Marmion can think of no better way of disposing of De Wilton than to employ Constance to put a parcel of forged letters, importing treasonable practices, into his portfolio, and thereafter arraign him of those offenses before their jealous sovereign. The forged papers give credit to this accusation; and the matter is referred to the judgment of God by a single combat between the two parties. In this contest the treacherous Marmion is victorious; and the true De Wilton, who is supposed to die of his wounds, assumes the dress of a palmer, and wanders from shrine to shrine brooding over his unmerited disgrace, and his natural purposes of revenge. Constance, in the meanwhile, who had lent herself to this scheme for promoting the marriage of

Marmion, only to make herself mistress of a secret which gave her power over his life, now resolves to gratify her own jealousy and envy by the destruction of the rival who had supplanted her in the heart of her seducer. She therefore engages a wicked monk in a plot to murder the Lady Clare; but before she can carry it into execution she is delivered up by Marmion, now . . . wearied out with her murmurs, to the spiritual superiors from whom she had fled, and by whom this new crime of projected murder is speedily detected. The Lady Clare, in the meantime, full of sorrow for De Wilton and of horror at his conqueror, had retired into the convent of Whitby, with the intention of taking the veil; and Lord Marmion, bearing down remorse with pride and ambition, was proceeding on an embassy from his sovereign to the court of James IV of Scotland, to inquire into the cause of the great levy of troops which that prince was making, and the destination of the vast army which he had assembled in the neighborhood of his capital.

"Such is the situation of matters at the commencement of the poem, which opens with the arrival of Lord Marmion and his train at the castle of Norham upon the Tweed, the last English post upon his road, where he takes up his quarters on a fine summer evening, in the year of our Lord 1513. The whole First Canto is taken up with the description of his train, and his reception and entertainment in the castle; every minute particular of which, from the letting down the drawbridge and bringing in the venison pasties for supper, down to the presentation of the stirrup cup at parting in the morning, is recorded with the most anxious and scrupulous exactness. While at table, he asks his host to provide him a guide to the Scottish court; and after some consultation, a holy palmer is introduced for this purpose, who afterwards turns out to be his injured rival De Wilton, although so much disguised by his dress, beard and misery, as not to be recognized by his oppressor. This is the only incident in the First Canto that can be said to bear at all upon the business of the poem. It ends with the departure of the embassy on the following morning under the guidance of the mysterious palmer.

"In the Second Canto, we entirely drop Lord Marmion and his retinue, in order to attend to the voyage of Clara, and the fate of Constance. This poor lady had been detected in her plot against her rival in the monastery of Holy Isle; and a chapter of the adjoining

superiors had been summoned to pass sentence on her for this crime and for the breach of her monastic vows. The Canto begins with a picture of the voyage of the abbess of Whitby, to assist at this tragic convocation. There is then a description of the abbey at Holy Isle, and an abstract of the legends connected with the history of its saints, and with those of the rival foundation of Whitby. Then comes the condemnation of Constance and her auxiliar monk. The judges assemble in a low, dark vault, paved with tombstones, and lighted with an iron chandelier, where two deep niches already appear in the massive walls, with stones and mortar laid, ready to immure the convicted delinquents. The monk howls and shrieks with unmanly and unheeded agonies of terror; but Constance maintains a lofty and heroic resolution. She discloses the whole perfidy of Marmion, in his accusation of De Wilton, and his baseness to herself. She expresses little penitence for her own conspiracy against the blameless Lady Clare; but after arraigning her judges of bigoted cruelty, and prophesying the speedy downfall of their powers she receives sentence from the stern blind abbot of Lindisfarne, and is left to expiate her offenses in the gloomy sepulcher to which she is committed.

"In the Third Canto, we return again to Lord Marmion and the palmer, who guides him in silence across the Border, and to the village of Gifford, in East Lothian, where the train halts for the night at a country inn. Here the ghastly visage, and keen, steady eye of the palmer disturbs the soul of Marmion, and awes the whole band into silence. Marmion tries to relieve this by calling on one of his squires for a song; but is still further annoyed, when he pitches upon a favorite air of Constance, and sings about the vengeance that is reserved for those who are perfidious in love. The host then tells a long story of a rencontre which took place in the neighborhood, between King Alexander III and a spirit in the shape of Edward I of England, in which the Scottish monarch discomfited his unearthly antagonist, and forced him to reveal the fortune that awaited him in the war in which he was engaged with the Danes. He concludes with saying, that any knight who will repair at midnight to the same spot, and blow his bugle of defiance, will still be encountered by an aërial representation of his greatest enemy; and, if victorious, may learn from him the destiny of his future life. Marmion is unable to sleep after hearing all these stories; and rising in the night, mounts

his charger, and gallops to the appointed ground, where he is encountered by the figure of De Wilton, and unhorsed in the first shock. His foe, however, spares his life, and disappears; and the astonished champion returns sullenly to his train. The reader will probably guess, what is afterwards related at length, that this unexpected opponent was no other than the real De Wilton himself, who had heard Marmion ride out, and suspecting his purpose had put off his palmer's dress, and borrowing the arms and the steed of one of his sleeping attendants, had followed and answered his challenge.

“The Fourth Canto pursues the march of Marmion to the Scottish court. In his way, he meets the chief Herald, or Lion King-at-Arms of Scotland, who had been dispatched to attend him, and who conducts him to a castle a few miles from Edinburgh, where he is to reside for a day or two, till the King is at leisure to receive him. Here the LordLion tells a strange story of a vision which had recently appeared to his sovereign at Linlithgow, warning him not to persist in his warlike resolutions; which Marmion repays, by recounting his night adventure at Gifford. At last they take the way to Edinburgh: and the Canto ends with a spirited description of the appearance of that city and the adjoining landscape, as it appears on gaining the summit of the hills that rise above it on the south, and of the great army that then lay encamped between the bottom of these hills and the walls. "The Fifth Canto begins with a more exact and detailed description of the different bands and sorts of forces through which Marmion passed in his way to the city. In the evening he is conducted to the court, which, as well as the person of the Scottish monarch, is described with great spirit and vivacity. He is then told that his sovereign's aggressions on the Border have been such as to leave little hope of accommodation; but that he is to take up his residence in Lord Angus's castle of Tantallon till the return of the herald who had been sent to complain of these injuries, and to denounce desperate hostility, if they were not instantly repaired. We now learn, too, that the Lady Abbess of Whitby, returning by sea with the Lady Clare, from the condemnation of poor Constance, had been captured by a Scottish privateer, and brought to Edinburgh, to await the disposal of the sovereign. These unfortunate persons are now put under the charge of Lord Marmion, and directed to remain with him at Tantallon, and to be conducted by him to their respective homes, upon his final return