The furious steed snorts fire and foam, and with a fearful bound Dissolves at once in empty air, and leaves her on the ground. Half seen by fits, by fits half heard, pale spectres flit along, Wheel round the maid in dismal dance, and howl her funeralsong."

This translation from the German, in his twenty-fifth year, was Scott's first attempt at poetry. At the age of twenty-nine he was appointed Sheriff of Selkirkshire, at a salary of £300 a year. Here he was enabled to deepen his "border studies."

Scott's next literary work was also a translation from the German, viz.: Goethe's early drama on the lawless iron-handed knight, Goetz von Berlichingen. Buerger and Goethe were both the product of the revolutionary wave in German thought, known as the "storm and stress period" (Sturm und Drang Periode); and we have thus the remarkable fact of two foreign revolutionary poets (Buerger and Goethe) producing a third poet, Scott, himself an anti-revolutionist !

After two years in his Sheriffwick, we find the first fruits of Scott's research in legendary lore. At the age of thirty-one, he published his " Border Minstrelsy," which gained him at once a high literary reputation. He had now struck his proper vein. His delight in the old, simple, antiquarian, violent world; his picturesque imagination; his power of calling back as by a trumpetblast the departed spirit of Scotch and English chivalry; and of re-echoing that joyful and Arcadian delight of all the Anglo-Saxon race in their green woods and feudal sports; his reverence for king and chief and constitution, combined with independent liberty for field burglary; his art of rousing from its forest tomb the very spirit of the old beloved Robin Hood, with his merry band of huntsmen, always ready to help themselves, to assist the weak, to render women knightly service, to risk their lives to free a comrade in distress-it was these dormant chords in English hearts that Walter Scott now smote with such a master hand, and revealed to the astonished world, and not less to his astonished self, that the right man had at length appeared at the right time and place;

as he sings with an evident relish in the song of Alice Brand

O merry it is in the good, green wood,

When the thrush and the merle are singing,

When the deer sweeps by, and the hounds are in cry,
And the hunter's horn is ringing.

Scott looked upon the great Duke of Buccleuch as the head of his house and clan; and the young Duchess was his ideal of ladyhood; and it was she who really inspired him to write his first great romantic poem. She requested him, in his frequent visits to the castle, to write a poem on the legend of Gilpin Horner, the goblinpage-a sort of local mischievous Puck. And thus the Lay of the Last Minstrel" was begun. But instead of leaving it a drawing poem on Gilpin Horner, the subject grew in Scott's prolific mind into a long romantic epic of chivalry and border battle, where the intended hero, Horner, occupies at last an insignificant position; and, as Scott said, "from the baseness of his natural propensities Horner slinks down into the kitchen as a scullion, where, I am afraid, he must henceforth abide."

The "Lay of the Last Minstrel " had an immense sale and success, and cleared the author some £770. The introductory lines, where the aged harper, "The Last Minstrel," plays in the baron's hall, are very clear and crystalline, and were admired by the Prime Minister, Pitt:

The way was long, the wind was cold,
The Minstrel was infirm and old;
His withered cheek and tresses grey
Seemed to have known a better day.
The harp, his sole remaining joy,
Was carried by an orphan boy;
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 palfry borne,
He carrolled, light as lark at morn;

No longer courted and caressed,
High placed in hall, a welcome guest,
He poured to lords and ladies 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.

The first canto opens with a picture of the feudal retinue and battle-readiness then maintained at every border castle

Nine-and-twenty knights of fame

Hung their shields in Branksome Hall;
Nine-and-twenty squires of name

Brought them their steeds to bower from stall;

Nine-and-twenty yeomen tall

Waited duteous on them all:

They were all knights of mettle true,
Kinsmen to the bold Buccleuch.

Ten of them were sheathed in steel,
With belted sword and spur on heel;
They quitted not their armour bright,
Neither by day nor yet by night,

But slept on buckler cold and hard;

They carved at the meal with gloves of steel,
And drank the red wine through the helmet barred.

Thirty steeds, both fleet and wight,

Stood saddled in stable day and night;

A hundred more fed free in stall:-
Such was the custom in Branksome Hall.
Why do these steeds stand ready dight?
Why watch these warriors armed by night?
They watch, to hear the bloodhound baying,
They watch, to hear the war-horn braying,
They watch, against Southern force and guile,
Lest Scroop, or Howard, or Percy's powers,
Threaten Branksome's lordly towers,

From Warkworth, or Naworth, or merry Carlisle.

The poem then goes on to tell how the late Duke of Buccleuch had been slain in a feud by the clan of Carr, and how the widowed Duchess reared her only boy in the

sole hope of avenging his father's death; how Lord Cranstoun, of the clan of Carr, loved this boy's only sister Margaret; how the boy was stolen by Gilpin Horner (the goblin page), who simulated him at the Castle; how Lord Cranstoun secured the boy, and then interchanged him for his sister Margaret (a thing any gentleman might have done); and how the marriage was effected and the families reconciled.

The opening of the second canto, depicting Melrose Abbey, is widely known and quoted. When Scott came to a ruined abbey, or dismantled castle, he took root, and embraced it all over, like a vine. The second line here is rather unfortunate, containing the hissing, dental combination of "visit it," where one would require a falsetto voice, or false set o' teeth, to articulate it distinctly. Then come the conditions under which the royal and majestic ruin should be seen—

If thou would'st view fair Melrose aright,
Go, visit it by the pale moonlight;
For the gay beams of lightsome day,
Gild, but to flout, the ruins grey.

When the broken arches are black in night,
And each shafted oriel glimmers white,

When the cold light's uncertain shower

Streams on the ruined central tower.

When buttress and buttress, alternately,
Seem framed of ebon and ivory;

When silver edges the imagery,

And the scrolls that teach thee to live and die;

When distant Tweed is heard to rave,

And the owlet to hoot o'er the dead man's grave,

Then go, but go alone the while;

Then view St. David's ruined pile,
And home returning, soothly swear,

Was never scene so sad and fair!

Certainly not a bad description of the Abbey, which Scott himself never saw by moonlight! For in a letter to a friend towards the close of his life, Scott confessed that he never actually saw Melrose by moonlight! And he then added the merry amendment

Then go-and meditate with awe
On scenes the author never saw,
Who never wandered by the moon
To see what could be seen by noon!

This is not at all wonderful, for a poet's single imagination is worth an ordinary man's double-barrelled vision. In his "William Tell," Schiller has given the best picture of Swiss scenery known in literature, yet Schiller never was in Switzerland!

If the beginning of the second canto of the Lay is Scotch and local, the beginning of the third is international and universal. Scott is always best and strongest at the beginning of his cantos and his works, thus revealing his impetuous Celtic strain of blood. This same Celtic strain kept Shakspere also from ever being dull, and often hurried him into putting the climax of his plays as early as the third act, instead of coolly keeping it back to the fifth.

So Scott crowded all his fancy goods into the front window. Indeed, not mentally alone, but physically also, Scott was most developed in the head and shoulders. He had an immense round head, with a peaked or pointed crown; and after his novel "Peveril of the Peak appeared, and his hair was thin, people saw the peak, and called him "Old Peveril." With Burns, on the other hand, the heart was the most developed, and it often galloped off with his head!

The old harper, warming up by the kindness of his reception in Branksome Hall, begins this third canto :—

And said I that my limbs were old,
And said I that my blood was cold,
And that my kindly fire was fled,
And my poor withered heart was dead,
And that I might not sing of Love?
How could I to the dearest theme
That ever warmed a minstrel's dream,
So foul, so false a recreant prove?
How could I name Love's very name,
Nor wake my heart to notes of flame?
In peace, Love tunes the shepherd's reed;
In war, he mounts the warrior's steed;

In halls, in gay attire is seen;

In hamlets, dances on the green;

Love rules the court, the camp, the grove,
And men below and saints above!

For love is heaven, and heaven is love.