earlier years he was greatly addicted to field sports towards 1812 this taste began to diminish, and he paid some attention to farming, but never took any steady interest in it. He was an early riser; was wont to do his writing work in the morning; and would then spend the rest of the day with his guests, or otherwise killing time, showing little or nothing of the professional author. His celerity in composition is attested, among innumerable other instances, by his having written the second and third volumes of Waverley in the afternoons of three summe weeks of 1814. He finished the Lay of the Last Minstre at the rate of about a canto per week. The Lord of the Isles was to a great extent written while the poet was in company: neither conversation nor music caused him any serious disturbance. As in character and habits of life, so in person, Scott was by no means exclusively or predominantly to be identified as a literary man. His face is too well known to demand or bear description: the long upright forehead, the straitened length of head, the deep grey eyes. The general aspect is perhaps that of a shrewd farmer, or countrygentleman of moderate estate, rather than anything else; sagacity, penetration, humour, usage of the world, power and habit of concentrated reflection, are all markedly discernible but the poet and romancist who flooded all Europe with his vivid and moving conceptions is hardly the personage that one would be prepared to read in such

a countenance.

As regards the merits of Walter Scott as a poet, it is difficult for some critics to be sufficiently affluent of praise, and for others to be sufficiently chary. When one has said that he is exceedingly spirited, one has expressed the most salient and the finest of his excellences: only we must remember that a narrative and romantic poet cannot be thus spirited without having other admirable gifts whence the spirit ensues, and whereby it is sustained-virility, knowledge of life, character, and circumstance, quick sympathy with man and nature, flow of invention, variety of presentment, a heart that vibrates to the noble and the right-much picturesqueness, some beauty. On the other hand, it is not untrue to say that Scott, though continually spirited, is also very frequently tame-and not free from

tameness even in his distinctively spirited passages. His phrases, when you pause upon them, are full of commonplace. The reason of this is that Scott was very little of a literary-poetic artist: greatness of expression-the heights and depths of language and of sound-were not much in his way. He respected his subject much more than he respected his art: after consulting and satisfying his own taste and that of his public, the thing had to do well enough. Scott has always been the poet of youthful and high-hearted readers there seems to be no reason why he should not continue indefinitely to meet their requirements, and cer.. tainly they will be considerable losers if ever, in the lapse of time and shifting of poetic models, his compositions should pass out of ready currency. He is not, and never can be, the poet of literary readers: the student and the artist remember him as a cherished enchantment of their youth, and do not recur to him. Neither the inner recesses of thought nor the high places of art thrill to his appeal. But it is highly possible for the critical tendency and estimate to be too exclusively literary; the poetry of Scott is mainly amenable to a different sort of test, and to that it responds not only adequately but triumphantly.

"Dum relego, scripsisse pudet; quia plurima cerno,
Me quoque, qui feci, judice, digua lini."

ΤΟ

THE RIGHT HONOURABLE

CHARLES, EARL OF DALKEITH,

THIS POEM IS INSCRIBED BY THE AUTHOR,

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION, 1805.

THE Poem now offered to the Public is intended to illustrate the customs and manners, which anciently prevailed on the Borders of England and Scotland. The inhabitants, living in a state partly pastoral and partly warlike, and combining habits of constant depredation with the influence of a rude spirit of chivalry, were often engaged in scenes highly susceptible of poetical ornament. As the description of scenery and manners was more the object of the Author, than a combined and regular narrative, the plan of the ancient metrical romance was adopted, which allows greater latitude, in this respect, than would be consistent with the dignity of a regular poem. The same model offered other facilities, as it permits an occasional alteration of measure, which, in some degree, authorises the changes of rhythm in the text. The machinery also, adopted from popular belief, would have seemed puerile in a poem, which did not partake of the rudeness of the old Ballad, or Metrical Romance.

For these reasons, the Poem was put into the mouth of an ancient Minstrel, the last of the race, who, as he is supposed to have survived the Revolution, might have caught somewhat of the refinement of modern poetry, without losing the simplicity of his original model. The date of the tale itself is about the middle of the sixteenth century, when most of the personages actually flourished. The time occupied by the action is three nights and three days.

INTRODUCTION.

THE way was long, the wind was cold,
The Minstrel was infirm and old;

His withered cheek, and tresses gray,
Seemed to have known a better day:
The harp, his sole remaining joy,
Was carried by an orphan boy:

A

1

The last of all the Bards was he,
Who sung of Border chivalry;
For, well-a-day! their date was fled,
His tuneful brethren all were dead;
And he, neglected and oppressed,
Wished to be with them, and at rest.
No more, on prancing palfrey borne,
He carolled, light as lark at morn;
No longer, courted and caressed,
High placed in hall, a welcome guest,
He poured, to lord and lady gay,

The unpremeditated lay:

Old times were changed, old manners gone;

A stranger filled the Stuarts' throne;

The bigots of the iron time

Had called his harmless art a crime.

A wandering harper, scorned and poor,
He begged his bread from door to door;
And tuned, to please a peasant's ear,
The harp a King had loved to hear.

He passed where Newark's stately tower
Looks out from Yarrow's birchen bower:
The Minstrel gazed with wishful eye-
No humbler resting-place was nigh.
With hesitating step, at last,

The embattled portal-arch he passed,
Whose ponderous grate, and massy bar,
Had oft rolled back the tide of war,
But never closed the iron door
Against the desolate and poor.
The Duchess marked his weary pace
His timid mien, and reverend face,
And bade her page the menials tell,
That they should tend the old man well.
For she had known adversity,
Though born in such a high degree;
In pride or power, in beauty's bloom,

Had wept o'er Monmouth's bloody tomb!

When kindness had his wants supplied,
And the old man was gratified,
Began to rise his minstrel pride.
And he began to talk, anon,

Of good Eari Francis, dead and gone,
And of Eari Walter, rest him, God!

A braver ne'er to battle rode:
And how full many a tale he knew,
Of the old warriors of Buccleuch ;

And, would the noble Duchess deign

To listen to an old man's strain,

Though stiff his hand, his voice though weak, He thought e'en yet, the sooth to speak,