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vice had degraded, or error led astray, it was with sorrow, and almost with tears.

"Marmion" was our author's second great work; published about two years after the first. Its reception was for a moment doubtful; it trembled for a while under the condemnation of the great reviewer, "Good night to Marmion,”but it was only to gather up its strength. Its boldness, fire, and imagery; its Homeric action, and more than Homeric painting, in spite of all the defects of an imperfectly developed plot these merits, together with the accidental claims of a new and highly popular school of poetry, soon bore down all critical objections, and like a torrent, which some rock has for a moment stayed, it but rushed on, when that rock was surmounted, with redoubled power over all meaner obstacles. But with all its merits Marmion is, in one respect, unquestionably inferior to its predecessor. The introductions to its cantos do not harmonize with the poem, like the Minstrel's bold or tender preludes-which, if with the author, we resemble them to a frame, binding together the parts of the picture are yet, we may add, like those rich carvings of some ancient artists, which rival in beauty and value even the pictures they are made to encircle. Still, however, the battle scene at Flodden-field has no equal in the Lay of the Minstrel, for that graphic power which makes us moved spectators in the scene. No-be it heresy or not-in my opinion, it is not to be found in Homer. The tumult of the eddying fight-the clouds of dust and smoke" the pennon as it sunk and rose"-the rushing steed, "housing and saddle bloody red"-the "Marmion to the rescue"-these constitute such a picture, as I know not where to find a parallel; and have always made my heart leap within me, though removed by many degrees from that ancestral land, above all, at that sorrowing appeal of the poet

And why stands Scotland idly now

Dark Flodden, on thine airy brow?

Lord Byron's quarrel with the poem, was, that the booksellers were willing to give, and the author to receive, one thousand guineas as the price of the copy. It may serve to mark the increasing patronage of authorship since that day, to mention that our celebrated countryman, Cooper, is now understood to realize, for each one of his novels, at least four times that sum which could arouse the ire of a lord, when viewed as the remuneration of one, whom he himself regarded as seated on the throne of poetry.

A third step in his poetic career, carried Scott to the summit of popular favor-it was like the last bound of Neptune's steeds. A fourth (to be bombastic with Longinus) would have carried him beyond the limits of earth. This was the 'Lady of the Lake," which, though written earlier, was not published until the summer of 1810.

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This poem was, as he himself tells us, "a labor of love," though readers might have guessed as much, from its felicitous execution. He took great pains to identify the local circumstances of the story, to which, as a tourist, I would here willingly bear witness, having found it (speaking in all simplicity) the best map and guide book, by which to thread the mazes of that romantic section of country. Each mountain, glen, and silver lake-rose, glimmered, or lay, just where he had pictured them—the Trosach's rugged jaws, I knew, as it were, by instinct; but when I came to where

"amid the copse 'gan peep

A narrow inlet, still and deep,"

so minutely accurate was the picture, that it seemed to me, I should have recognized Loch Katrine in whatever quarter of the world I had met it. The pibroch and the Gaelic boatsong were there too, to greet us—the rock and the slanting oak identified Ellen's isle-and to complete the illusion, her sylvan bower, with all its rude and martial accompaniments, greet the tourist as he lands. For this last, he is indebted to

the taste or pride of Lord Willoughby, to whom the island belongs though the merit of its addition is more than balanced by his desecration of the woods that "frown upon Loch Katrine, and weep upon Achray." They were under the woodman's axe as we passed; and although Sir Walter smiled at the youthful zeal of those who indignantly told him of it, yet could I not help thinking, he esteemed it an unkinder cut than any the critics had given him. Such poetry made the scenes it commemorated classic ground for the tourist. I did not wonder, therefore, at what he laughingly told us he received soon after its publication; a petition mixed with remonstrance from their neighbors of Loch Lomond, that he would perform the same kind office for their nobler lake.

But in such a poem, local description is a minor beauty; it was a fidelity of which all could judge that made and upholds it so universal a favorite. The tender, the romantic, the lovely, and the fair, whether in the material or moral creation, are images that need no outward model for the heart to recognize their truth; they dwell within the breast, even of him who never felt their power, and he who awakens them to life is the true poet such need no critic to uphold them-he wins every voice who can bring tears into every eye. Now with such touches of nature this poem abounds, and it is the surest pledge of its lasting reputation.

To the poet, the cup of honor was now full; another drop would have made it to overflow, and like all things human, which can never remain at stay, it began to decline. The poem of Rokeby followed in 1813. The Lord of the Isles in 1815, and the Bridal of Triermain, with Harold the Dauntless, in 1816, which last may be termed the close of Scott's poetic career.

It will be the lot of some future critic to analyze the causes of this rapid decline of popularity; to determine how far the poet, how far the public were in fault-to me it has always seemed that the author's powers were then in what may be

geologically termed their transition state; passing from the forms of poetry, to those of romance, or, in other words, that these latter poems had risen in the display of character, but fallen in poetic imagery. Other causes, however, operated; the public began to weary of the romantic school: its rhymes were cheap in the market, since it was found that measures, once considered the prerogative of genius, had become the inheritance of every bold and lawless scribbler, who was for justifying anarchy under the name and sanction of an illustrious and successful rebel-but

"Licence they mean, when they cry Liberty."

Scott, therefore, soon ceased as a poet, to be lord of the ascendant. Another star too, had then just arisen, whose meteor light attracted all eyes, and Scott himself acknowledges, that the consciousness of Byron's advance, in the lists, "a mighty and unexpected rival" palsied his powers, and made the task of composition in his latter poems "somewhat heavy and hopeless."

To yield power without a sigh, may be the part of wisdom, but to yield it without a struggle, belongs only to a feeble mind. Such was not Scott's, and the failure of his poetry in the presence of Byron's, (a fact which his family in conversation were more apt to over-state than to deny,) threw him upon a new effort to recover the ground he had lost, and led to one of the most remarkable and successful instances of anonymous authorship, which the literary world had ever witnessed: to borrow the happy allusion of Cunningham's, "it was like his own black knight in Ivanhoe, who not only chose to fight with his beaver down, but refused to raise it and show himself, when he had overcome all opponents" and to this analogy we may add, that the cause of refusal was in both the same, viz. because it was their own banished sovereign, come to vindicate, with resistless arm, his lost dominion.

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The motive assigned by the author to me in conversation its adoption, was simply caprice, or, as he has said in print-"such was my humor"-but we may easily conjecture, it was not void of judgment. It was an inroad he was making on a new province, where, knowing neither his own. strength, nor the difficulties of the way, victory was by no means certain: it was a venture on an untried ocean, where, like a prudent merchant, he was unwilling to embark his whole treasure. But it is singular, how dubious he was of his own powers, in a department of composition for which every natural talent seemed to fit him, and one in which the judgment of the public at once set him above every competitor. A third part of the first volume of Waverley went literally through the Horatian ordeal, “nonum prematur in annum," though it must be acknowledged, that its nine years' sleep was passed in a very uncritical way, in a neglected cabinet, among flies and fishing-tackle. It was written in 1805, and published in 1814.

If the period of its publication was one of anxiety, as it necessarily must have been, it was fortunate for the author that chance or choice had made him, at that very time, one of an official but gay ocean party, making the tour and leisurely survey of the capes and headlands of the northern part of the island; and just escaping, at its close (what to some of us might have had its consolations) the perilous visit of an American privateer. Waverley, in the mean time, had taken hold on the feelings of the public, and he returned just in time to be greeted with his own praises, in the universal hue and cry that was raised after the nameless author.

Why he chose to continue in masque after the public had decided in his favor, and more especially, as the secret often subjected him to dilemmas, in which no man of a nice sense of veracity would voluntarily place himself; is a question more easily asked than answered, even with all the light the

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