Introductions to the "Lay” and “Marmion,” and, less successfully, though even here with much grace, in "Triermain;" but they are not wrought up into a whole; they do not form an integral portion of the poem. On the other hand, the metrical descriptions of scenery, if not more picturesque and vivid than those of the romances, tell more forcibly; they also relieve the narrative, by allowing the writer's own thoughts and interests to touch our hearts: an expedient used by Scott with singular skill. The "Edinburgh" of "Marmion" is a splendid example; but others are scattered through the less familiarly known poems, which, it is hoped, will in this edition find a fresh circle of readers, who are little likely to regret the study.

Scott's incompleteness of style, which is more injurious to poetry than to prose, his "careless glance and reckless rhyme," have been alleged by a great writer of our time as one reason why he is now less popular as a poet than he was in his own day, when from two to three thousand copies of his metrical romances were yearly sold. Beside these faults, which are visible almost everywhere, the charge that he wants depth and penetrative insight, has been often brought. He does not "wrestle with the mystery of existence," it is said; he does not try to solve the problems of human life. Scott, could he have foreseen this criticism, would probably not have been very careful to answer it. He might have allowed its correctness, and said that one man might have this work to do, but his was another. High and enduring pleasure, however conveyed, is the end of poetry. "Othello" gives this by its profound display of tragic passion. "Paradise Lost" gives it by its religious sublimity: "Childe Harold" by its meditative picturesqueness: the “Lay" by its brilliant delineation of ancient life and manners. These are but scanty samples of the vast range of poetry. In that house are many mansions. All poets may be seers and teachers; but some teach directly, others by a less ostensible and larger process. Scott never lays bare the workings of his mind, like Goethe or Shelley; he does not draw out the moral of the landscape, like Wordsworth; rather, after the fashion of Homer and the writers of the ages before criticism, he presents a scene, and leaves it to work its own effect on the reader. His most perfect and lovely poems, the short songs which occur scattered through the metrical or the prose narratives, are excellent instances. He is the most unselfconscious of our modern poets; perhaps, of all our poets; the difference in this respect between him and his friends Byron and Wordsworth is like a difference of centuries. If they give us the inner spirit of modern life, or of nature, enter into our perplexities, or probe our deeper passions, Scott has a dramatic faculty not less delightful and precious. He hence attained eminent success in one of the rarest and most difficult aims of Poetry,-sustained vigour, clearness, and interest in narration. If we reckon up the poets of the world, we may be surprised to find how very few (dramatists not included) have accomplished this, and may be hence led to estimate Scott's rank in his art more justly. One looks through the English poetry of the first half of the century in vain, unless it be here and

there indicated in Keats, for such a power of vividly throwing himself into others as that of Scott. His contemporaries, Crabbe excepted, paint emotions. He paints men when strongly moved. They draw the moral; but he can invent the fable. It would be rash to try to strike a balance between men, each so great in his own way; the picture of one could not be painted with the other's palette; all are first-rate in their kind; and every reader can choose the style which gives him the highest, healthiest, and most lasting pleasure.

It is, however, only by considering Scott in relation to his own age and the circumstances in which he formed himself, that we can reach a full estimate of him as a poet. This mode of viewing a man, it is true, has been sometimes pressed too far. Genius, in one sense the child of its century, in another is its father. Circumstances explain much: but they do not account for it. The individuality of the poet will always be the central point in him; there is an element in the soul insoluble to the most scientific analysis of a man's surroundings. But much light is undoubtedly gained by examining them. Scott received early, as we have seen, his direction in literature. Coming at the close of an age of criticism, he inaugurated an age of revival and of creation. It has been already noticed that there was something of reaction in this. Love of the ballads of Scotland, of mediaeval legends, of German romantic poetry, had unconsciously impressed his style upon him before 1800. Already his passion was to describe wild and adventurous characters, to delineate the natural landscape, to seek the persons of his drama in feudal times or in the common life around him. The weighty satire of Dryden or Johnson, the cultivated world of Pope, the classical finish of Gray, although admired for their own merits, had no share in his heart of hearts. The friend of Dr. Blacklock, the child of the Edinburgh of Hume and Adam Smith, he was a "born romantic” without knowing it. Beyond any one he is the discoverer or creator of the "modern style." How much is implied in this! . . It is true that by 1805 two other great leaders had already begun their career. Coleridge's fragment of "Christabel" was known to Scott, and influenced him in the "Lay." Wordsworth had published some of the most charming of his lyrics. But these men had as yet produced little effect, and the new faith nowhere found fewer believers than in Edinburgh; where, partly through the reluctance of the ordinary mind to accept originality, in part through the intense conservatism of literature, poets who now rank among the glories of England were treated as heretics with idle condemnation. It was some time before Scott could raise himself above this atmosphere, and say of the leading critic of the time, "Our very ideas of what is poetry differ so widely, that we rarely talk upon these subjects. There is something in Mr. Jeffrey's mode of reasoning that leads me greatly to doubt whether he really has any feeling of poetical genius." Few people are now likely to dispute this estimate; and no one did more to discredit the narrow criticism prevalent sixty years since than Scott. If Lord Macaulay's

opinion be correct, that Byron's poetry served to introduce and to popularize Wordsworth's, Scott's even more decidedly cleared the way for "Childe Harold" and the "Giaour." Indeed, much in Byron is modelled upon the older poet, to whom he always looked up with a respectful affection which makes one of the brightest spots in his own chequered story. "Of all men Scott is the most open, the most honourable, the most amiable."

With the proceeds of "Rokeby" Scott made himself master of a cottage then called Clarty Hole, but soon characteristically renamed Abbotsford, close to the Tweed, about midway between Melrose, Ashestiel, and Selkirk. Bare and essentially unimproveable is most of the land hereabout: Scott did something for it by planting,—the favourite outdoor employment of his middle life; yet to an English eye the trees have a poor, sad, nay (what from his work one did not expect), even a formal and unpicturesque, air; the wider views over the Border are rather desolate than impressive; there is neither the sweet "pastoral melancholy" of Yarrow, nor the verdure and richness of Melrose. But to the inner eye of the poet this region displayed scenes more lovely than Sorrento, more romantic than Monte Rosa. There was the Roman way to the ford by the house, the "Catrail" which had bounded

Reged wide

And fair Strath-Clyde;

the glen of Thomas the Rhymer, famous in fairy tradition; the haunted ruins of Boldside; the field of the battle of Melrose, the last great clan-fight of the Borders;-Melrose visible eastward, the Eildon Hills cleft into their picturesque serration by Michael Scott, south; Tweed flowing below the house and audible in it with its silver ripple. . . . Some ambition to found a line of “Scotts of Abbotsford," fated not to be fulfilled; even some fancy less worthy of a great mind, to be himself a lord of acres, may have influenced him when he laid out so much money and energy on the lands of Abbotsford, and on the endless antiquarian details of the house which he built there. Yet many phrases in his writings, and, far more, what we know of Scott's nature through life, afford convincing proofs that the possessions he really and veritably sought for were these memories of the past these relics of that ancient Scotland for which he felt, "like a lover or a child," with a rare and noble passion. Abbotsford, with its Gothic architecture,— tasteful and poetically-imagined, if, to our more trained eyes, imperfect in many particulars-its armour and stained glass and carved oak, its library of precious mediaeval lore, poetry and history, its museum of little things consecrated by great remembrances, to Scott was a place where actual life was beautified by the ideal of his imagination, a Waverley romance realized in stone, a castle of his waking dreams, and held, also, as it proved, like those he sung of, rather by some fanciful and fairy tenure than by matter-of-fact possession. The gray mass of Abbotsford, with its sombre plantations, is not more enriched and glorified in

Turner's lovely drawing, than the lordship of these barren acres was to Scott by the predominating poet within him.

In 1814 Scott was one of a cheerful company who coasted round Scotland in a yacht engaged upon lighthouse business, touching at the Hebrides, Orkneys, Western Isles, and north of Ireland. A pleasant journal records the incidents of this trip, saddened at the close by the death of a dear friend, the Duchess of Buccleuch. It is a curious point of likeness between Scott and Goethe that, both being poets eminently interested in seeing men, and cities, and wild nature, and both also personally independent, yet the journeys of both were remarkably limited. Goethe never saw London, Paris, or Vienna. Except a hasty trip in 1810, Scott made but this one visit to the North and West of Scotland, and hardly knew more of England than lay between Berwick and London. The world must have lost much by this; but it is possible that the poets were guided by a true instinct, and feared lest the amount and vividness of the impressions which would have poured in upon them might be overpowering to the free exercise of their genius.

With an exultation natural to him, Scott now witnessed the first fall of Napoleon. He also completed his valuable edition of Swift's works. But the year is most remarkable to his biographer through that event which marks the beginning of the third epoch in Scott's life,-the publication of “Waverley.”

III

During the period here closed, powerful rivals in poetry had risen to divide the popularity of Scott. Byron had carried the manner of his tales into more passionate scenes of life. Crabbe had enlarged that gallery of human character which, if wanting in beauty, in originality and number stands alone amongst the poems of the time. The allegiance of those lovers of the inmost spirit of poetry who give the law to the next generation had been secured by Wordsworth. The brilliant dawn of Shelley was breaking on a yet unconscious world. Our modern school had passed the circle within which Scott had once been the chief magician. He felt this; and, never strictly a believer in his own powers, had already set himself to put into the prose form which suited it best some of the vast material which he had gathered; beginning with the last greatly romantic event in Scottish history, Waverley," commenced in 1805 (whence the second title "Sixty Years Since "), taken up in 1810, was completed now, and published in July 1814. The last two volumes were written within three weeks of that summer of excitement, a fact of which Mr. Lockhart tells a very striking anecdote (iv: 172,3). From motives already touched on, Scott carefully concealed the authorship; and although long before his name was announced (1827) little

doubt remained in the minds of intelligent men, this first novel wanted the impulse of his already acquired fame: yet the blow went home, the success was immediate, and the writer had once more "found himself" in literature.

A few more dates will mark, in a general way, the course of the writer's genius in this field. "Guy Mannering" appeared in 1815; "The Antiquary" and "Old Mortality" next year; "The Heart of Mid-Lothian," 1818; "Bride of Lammermoor" and "Ivanhoe," 1819; "Kenilworth" and "The Pirate," 1821; "St. Ronan's Well," 1823; the "Fair Maid of Perth," 1828. These may be considered! the typical works of the series; though there is hardly one which does not display the wonderful versatility of their author. Take even the feeblest of the "Waverley Novels," when shall we see the like again, in this style of romance ?-Goethe was accustomed to speak of Scott as the "greatest writer of his time," as unique and unequalled. When asked to put his views on paper, he replied with the remark which he made also upon Shakespeare, Scott's art was so high, that it was hard to attempt giving a formal opinion on it. But a few words may be added on the relation borne by the Novels to the author's character. Putting aside those written in depressed spirits and failing health, the inequality of merit in the remainder appears almost exactly proportioned, not to their date, but to the degree in which they are founded on Scottish life during the century preceding 1771. In this leading characteristic they are the absolute reproduction of the writer's own habitual thoughts and interests. Once more, we find in them a practical compromise between past and present. We have had no writer whose own country was more completely his inspiration. But he is inspired by the "ain countree" he had seen, or heard of from those who were old during his youth. As he recedes from Scotland and from "sixty years since,” his strength progressively declines. What we see as the series advances, are not so much signs that he had exhausted himself, as symptoms that he had exhausted the great situations of the century before his own birth; and "St. Ronan's Well" remains the solitary proof that, had events encouraged Scott to throw himself frankly into contemporary life, he might (in the writer's judgment) have been first of the English novelists here, as he indisputably is in the romance of the past.

It has been observed that one of the curious contrasts which make up that complex creature, Walter Scott, is the strong attraction which drew him, as a Lowlander the born natural antagonist of the Gael, to the Highland people. Looking back on the Celtic clans as we happily may, as a thing of the far past, softened by distance, coloured by the finest tints of poetry, and with that background of noble scenery which has afforded to many of us such pure and lofty pleasure, we cannot conceive without a painful effort that within a few years of Scott's own birth the Highlander had been to the Lowlander much what the Hindoo,-the Afghan or Mahratta at least,—is at present to the Englishman. All that we admire in the Gael had been to the Scot proper the source of contempt and of repugnance. Such a feeling is one of the worst instincts of human nature; it is an unmistakeable part of