He had two sons one dying young, and the other of weak mind-lingering many years—a great grief and source of anxiety to his father, who had the reputation of being exacting and stern in his family. He edited for a long time the New Monthly Magazine, and wrote much for it, but is represented to have been, in its conduct, careless, hypercritical, and dilatory. He lectured, too, before the Royal Institute on poetry; read oratorically and showily-his subject matter being semi-philosophical, with a great air of learning and academically dry; there was excellent system in his discourses, and careful thinking on themes remote from most people's thought. He wrote some historical works which are not printed nowadays; his life of Mrs. Siddons is bad; his life of Petrarch is but little better; some poems he published late in life are quite unworthy of him and are never read. Nevertheless, this prim, captious gentleman wrote many things which have the ring of truest poetry and which will be dear to the heart of England as long as English ships sail forth to battle. WALTER SCOTT. 59 A Minstrel of the Border. Yet another Scotsman whose name will not be forgotten-whether British ships go to battle, or idle at the docks-is Walter Scott. * I scarce know how to begin to speak of him. We all know him so well-thanks to the biography of his son-in-law, Lockhart, which is almost Boswellian in its minuteness, and has dignity besides. We know as we know about a neighbor's child of his first struggles with illness, wrapped in a fresh sheepskin, upon the heathery hills by Smailholme Tower; we know of the strong, alert boyhood that succeeded; he following, with a firm seat and free rein-amongst other gamethe old wives' tales and border ballads which, thrumming in his receptive ears, put the Edinboro law studies into large confusion. Swift after this comes the hurry-scurry of a boyish lovechase-beginning in Grey Friar's church-yard; *Walter Scott, b. 1771; d. 1832; Lay of Last Minstrel, 1805; Marmion, 1808; Lady of the Lake, 1810; Waverley, 1814; Woodstock, 1826; Life of Napoleon, 1827; Life, by Lockhart, 1832-37. she, however, who sprung the race-presently doubles upon him, and is seen no more; and he goes lumbering forward to another fate. It was close upon these experiences that some friends of his printed privately his ballad of William and Helen, founded on the German Lenore : "Tramp, tramp! along the land they rode! Splash, splash! along the sea! The scourge is red, the spur drops blood, And the spirit and dash of those four lines were quickly recognized as marking a new power in Scotch letters; and an echo of them, or of their spirit, in some shape or other, may be found, I think, in all his succeeding poems and in all the tumults and struggles of his life. The elder Scott does not like this philandering with rhyme; it will spoil the law, and a solid profession, he thinks; and true enough it does. For the Border Minstrelsy comes spinning its delightfully musical and tender stories shortly after Lenore; and a little later appears his first long poem- the Lay of the Last Minstrel which waked all Scot land and England to the melody of the new mas WALTER SCOTT. 61 ter. He was thirty-four then; ripening later than Campbell, who at twenty-one had published his Pleasures of Hope. There was no kinship in the methods of the two poets; Campbell all precision, and nice balance, delicate adjustment of language-stepping from point to point in his progress with all grammatic precautions and with well-poised poetic steps and demi-volts, as studied as a dancing master's; while Scott dashed to his purpose with a seeming abandonment of care, and a swift pace that made the " pebbles fly." Just as unlike, too, was this racing freedom of Scott'swhich dragged the mists away from the Highlands, and splashed his colors of gray, and of the purple of blooming heather over the moors-from that other strain of verse, with its introspections and deeper folded charms, which in the hands of Wordsworth was beginning to declare itself humbly and coyly, but as yet with only the rarest applause. I cannot make this distinction clearer than by quoting a little landscape picture - let us say from Marmion― and contrasting with it another from Wordsworth, which was composed six years or more before Marmion was published. First, then, from Scott-and nothing prettier and quieter of rural sort belongs to him,— "November's sky is chill and drear, November's leaf is red and sear; Late gazing down the steepy linn That hems our little garden in." (I may remark, in passing, that this is an actual description of Scott's home surroundings at Ashestiel.) "Low in its dark and narrow glen You scarce the rivulet might ken, There it is a completed picture; do what you will with it! Reading it, is like a swift, glad stepping along the borders of the brook. Now listen for a little to Wordsworth; it is a scrap from Tintern Abbey : |