prophetic sadness in the songs Fitz-Eustace sings as Lord Marmion and the mysterious Palmer sit by the hostel fire! Such dramatic variety of lyrical utterance has been seen in no poetry since Shakespeare's.

The songs which are found elsewhere have equal variety. The wild, fierce "Pibroch of Donuil Dhu" is in strong contrast with the melancholy music of the "Maid of Neidpath." In one mood Sir Walter gives us that divine song—

The sun upon the Weirdlaw Hill,

In Ettrick's vale, is sinking sweet;
The westland wind is hushed and still,
The lake lies sleeping at my feet:

in another he gaily chaffs the claret-loving bibliomaniacs of the Bannatyne Club with pleasant afterdinner personalities

As bitter as gall, and as sharp as a razor,
And feeding on herbs like a Nebuchadnezzar,
His diet too acid, his temper too sour,

Little Ritson came out with his two volumes more.

But one volume more, my friends, one volume more;
We'll dine on roast beef and print one volume more :

while in a third he catches "the wild war-notes of bonny Dundee," and, as that fierce cavalier and his followers hurry through Edinburgh streets, gives to

the stirring picture a vague and visionary background in the marvellous line

There are hills beyond Pentland, and lands beyond Forth.

Scarcely less remarkable than Scott's lyrics are the mottoes which he prefixed to the chapters of his novels. Lockhart tells us that he first fabricated mottoes when reading the proofs of "The Antiquary." He had asked John Ballantyne to find him a passage in Beaumont and Fletcher. The lines were not discoverable. "Hang it, Johnnie," said Scott, "I believe I can make a motto sooner than you can find one." So he made a motto: and from that time, whenever he did not think of an appropriate quotation, some imaginary "old play" or "old ballad" afforded the requisite rhyme. Many of these impromptu scraps are racy of the rich poetic soil whence they sprang. The free and manly spirit of Sir Walter breathes through such an "anonymous" quatrain as this:

Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife!

To all the sensual world proclaim,
One crowded hour of glorious life

Is worth an age without a name.

There is no possibility, in making a selection from the works of any poet, of satisfying either selector or

reader. The difficulty increases when it becomes necessary to extract passages from a narrative work whose architectonice is of the highest order. The constructive power of Sir Walter Scott is no ordinary faculty and it is with real regret that I sever from his poems the episodes and lyrics which are as deftly fitted to their place as the symmetric columns and divine statues of some temple that overhung the fairflowing river by which Helen dwelt before there was war in Troy. But the function of a selection is to guide those who read it to the complete works of the poet; to quicken a desire to enter the temple whose statues have the true Olympian air, whose capitals mock the acanthus with their marble wreathing. And Sir Walter Scott's poetry contains elements very needful to this generation. He is manly, healthy, courageous, loyal, pure. The chief poet of Scotland -the most passionate lover of her old romantic legends he is yet a thorough Englishman, in the widest sense of the word. Even so, though perchance the Ionian maidens sang truly of Homer—

Τυφλὸς ἀνὴρ, οἰκεῖ δὲ Χίῳ ἔνι παιπαλοέσσῃ·
Τοῦ πᾶσαι μετόπισθεν ἀριστεύουσιν αἰοδαί

he must always be to us the representative of all Greece in the age of heroes.

It only remains for me to acknowledge the courteous permission of Mr. James Hope Scott, of Abbotsford, to publish the last verses which Sir Walter wrote, and the kindness of Miss Priscilla Wordsworth in furnishing a copy of them. They are extremely interesting to all who delight in the poetry of Scott and of Wordsworth, although they scarcely prove the statement of the Bishop of St. Andrew's, that Scott received from Wordsworth " warm encouragement." Wordsworth wrote thus to the author of "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 composition, both as to matter and manner." How could the great meditative philosophic poet sympathise with the master of old romance? Did Hesiod admire the "Iliad "?

KNOWL HILL, BERKS,

April, 1866.

MORTIMER COLLINS.