fashion that tends to bewilder the reader. While the Setons were very devoted followers of queen Mary, the Henry Seton and Catherine Seton of the novel are merely imaginary creations. Although Mary Seton, one of 'the four Marys,' was sent for by the queen to attend on her in England, and Lord Seton met her shortly after her escape from Lochleven, no lady of the name of Seton was in attendance on her in Lochleven castle. What is worse, the Lady Mary Fleming, whom Scott represents as in attendance on her there is apt to be confounded either with Lady Fleming, who was the queen's governess in France, or with Mary Fleming, one of the four Marys, who, by this time, was the wife of Maitland of Lethington. Further, while Scott may partly be excused for his version of the nature of the pressure on the queen to cause her to demit her crown, he is specially unfortunate in representing Sir Robert Melville as deputed by the council to accompany Lord Lindsay on his mission, though his presence undoubtedly adds to the effectiveness of the scene with the queen. Again, in Old Mortality, Scott found it advisable, for artistic purposes, to place Henry Morton in a more immediately dangerous position than could possibly have been his; and, on the other hand, the indulged minister Poundtext, whom he represents as seeking to exercise a moderating influence in the council of the rebels, could not have been there, since none of the indulged ministers took part in the rebellion. Many minor errors of detail in his Scottish novels have also been pointed out by critics; but the important matter is his mastery of the multifarious characteristics of the period with which he deals and his power to bring home to the reader its outstanding peculiarities.

In the non-Scottish novels, and in Scottish novels of earlier periods of history, the spirit of romance is the prevailing element. Here, the portraiture of characters, except in the case of main figures, is generally superficial. Such humorous or eccentric personages as are introduced cannot compare with those who, in the novels of the more modern periods, indulge in the vernacular; they are a kind of hybrid creation, suggested, partly, from the author's own observation and, partly, by books. In the Scottish novels of the more modern periods, while the romance is of a more homely kind, and has, also, for us, lost its freshness in a manner that the earlier or the foreign element has not, there is included, on the other hand, that immortal gallery of Scottish characters to which allusion has already been made,

and the creation of which-however highly his purely romantic genius may be estimated-is the most unequivocal testimony to his greatness.

Great as was the actual achievement of Scott, it has reasonably been doubted whether he made the most of his extraordinary endowments. It was hardly contributory to this that, though by no means a poor man, he set himself with desperate eagerness to enrich himself by literature. While he had a deep enthusiasm for the literary vocation; while the hours he spent in writing were mostly hours of keen delight to him and he never apparently deemed it a toil; yet, his social aspirations seem to have been stronger than his literary ambition. As Lockhart states:

'His first and last worldly ambition was himself to be the founder of a distinct branch,' of the clan Scott; he 'desired to plant a lasting root, and dreamt not of lasting fame, but of long distant generations rejoicing in the name of "Scott of Abbotsford." By this idea all his reveries, all his aspirations, all his plans and efforts were overshadowed and controlled.'

This ambition was the product of the same romantic sentiment which was the original inspiration of his literary efforts. It was not a mere vulgar striving for opulence and rank; it was associated with peculiar border partialities and enthusiasms; to be other than a border laird and chief and the founder of a new border house had no charms for him. Still, excusable as his ambition may have been, it was to have for him very woeful consequences. Though, without this special incentive, he might not have exerted himself so strenuously in literature as he did, he would have escaped the pecuniary disasters in a herculean effort to remedy which he overtaxed his brain and abruptly shortened his life; and, if the absence of ulterior motives might have lessened his literary production, its fruits might, in quality, have been considerably bettered. True, rapidity of production was one of his special gifts. It was rendered possible by his previous mastery of his materials and the possession of a nervous system which it was almost impossible to tire; and, in his case, the emotional excitement of creation almost demanded celerity of composition; but it was not incumbent on him to omit careful revision of his first drafts. Had he not disdained this, many somewhat wearisome passages might have been condensed, various errors or defects of style might have been corrected, redundances might have been removed, inconsistencies weeded out and the plots more effectively adjusted. How immensely he might have bettered the literary quality of his novels by careful revision there is sufficient proof in that

splendid masterpiece Wandering Willie's Tale, the manuscript of which shows many important amendments.

While the carelessness of Scott is manifest in defects of construction and in curious contradictions in small details, it is more particularly apparent in the style of portions of merely narrative or descriptive passages. Yet, with all its frequent clumsiness, its occasional lapses into mere rodomontade, its often loosely interwoven paragraphs, and its occasionally halting grammar, his style is that of a great writer. Except when he overburdens it with lore, legal or antiquarian, it sparkles with interest, its phrases and epithets are often exceptionally happy, and, in his more emotional or more strikingly imaginative passages, he attains to an exceptional felicity of diction. This is the case throughout Wandering Willie's Tale; and the description of the ghastly revellers in Redgauntlet castle beginning: "There was the fierce Middleton,' is unsurpassable in apt and graphic phraseology. The farewell of Meg Merrilies to Ellangowan has, also, been singled out by critics for special praise; but many of his purely descriptive passages are, likewise, wholly admirable. Take, for example, the account of the gathering storm in The Antiquary:

The disk of the sun became almost totally obscured ere he had altogether sunk below the horizon, and an early and lurid shade of darkness blotted the serene twilight of a summer evening, etc.

or the picture in The Abbot of the various personages and groups that traversed the vestibule of Holyrood palace: 'Here the hoary statesman,' etc.; or the description of the Glasgow midnight in Rob Roy :

Evening had now closed and the growing darkness gave to the broad, still and deep expanse of the brimful river, first a hue sombre and uniform-then a dismal and turbid appearance, partially lighted by a waning and pallid moon, etc.

or the woodland scene in The Legend of Montrose, where Dalgetty is pursued by the bloodhounds of the marquis of Argyll :

The moon gleamed on the broken pathway and on the projecting cliffs of rock round which it winded, its light intercepted here and there by the branches of bushes and dwarf trees, which finding nourishment in the crevices of the rocks, in places overshadowed the brow and ledge of the precipice. Below a thick copsewood lay in deep and dark shadow, etc. Passages such as these are common with Scott; and, as for his dialogues, though, in the English, he occasionally lapses into curious

stiltednesses, the Scottish or semi-Scottish are invariably beyond praise, both for their apt expressiveness, and their revelation of character.

Necessarily, Scott's influence was felt more drastically in Scotland than elsewhere. The enormous interest aroused there by the publication of his poetic romances and then of his novels we can now hardly realise. It quite outvied that immediately caused by the poetry of Burns, who, to use Burns's own expression, was less 'respected' during his life than he gradually came to be after his death. While some aspects of Scott's presentations of the past called forth, at first, some protests from the stricter sectarians, the general attitude towards them was that of enthusiastic appreciation; and it is hardly possible to exaggerate their effect in liberating Scotland from the trammels of social and religious tradition. He did not, however, found a poetic school in Scotland. In England, he had various poetic imitators that are now forgotten; and he had, further, a good deal to do with the predominance of narrative in subsequent English verse. Byron, also, was directly indebted to him in the case of his narrative verse, and echoes of his method and manner are even to be found in Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome. In fiction, he may almost be reckoned the founder of the historical romance, in which he has had many successors, both in this country and abroad; and, if Smollett was his predecessor in the Scottish novel, and is more responsible than he for the earlier novels of Galt, Scott may be deemed the originator of a pretty voluminous Scottish romantic school, of which the most distinguished representative is R. L. Stevenson; while, with Smollett and Galt, he has been the forerunner of a vernacular school of fiction which, within late years, developed into a variety to which the term 'kailyard has, with more or less appositeness, been applied. On the continent, Scott shared with Byron a vogue denied to all other English writers except Shakespeare, and his influence was closely interwoven with the romantic movement there, and, more especially, with its progress in France.

CHAPTER II

BYRON

GEORGE GORDON, sixth Lord Byron, and descendant of an ancient Norman family that accompanied William the Conqueror to England, was the only son of 'Mad Jack' Byron by his second marriage with the Scottish heiress, Catherine Gordon of Gight. He was born in London, on 22 January 1788; but, shortly after his birth, owing to his father's withdrawal to France in order to escape from his creditors, the future poet was brought by his mother to Aberdeen. Here, his first boyhood was spent, and the impressions which he received of Deeside, Lochnagar and the Grampians remained with him throughout his life and have left their mark upon his poetry. By the death of his great-uncle, William, fifth Lord Byron, in 1798, the boy succeeded to the title and to the Byron estates of Newstead priory and Rochdale; in the year 1801, he entered Harrow school. Up to this time, his life had been that of 'a wild mountain colt'; his education, both intellectual and moral, had been neglected, and his mother petted and abused him in turn; his father had died when he was a child of three. Sensitive and proud by nature, his sensitiveness was aggravated by his lameness and his poverty, while his pride was nurtured by his succession, at the age of ten, to a peerage. At Harrow, he made many friends, read widely and promiscuously in history and biography, but never became an exact scholar. To these schoolboy years also belongs the story of his romantic, unrequited love for Mary Ann Chaworth. From Harrow, Byron proceeded, in October 1805, to Trinity college, Cambridge; but the university, though it widened his circle of friends, never won his affections in the way that Harrow had. While at Harrow, he had written a number of short poems, and, in January 1807, he printed for private circulation a slender volume of verse, Fugitive Pieces, the favourable reception of which led to the publication, in the following March, of Hours of Idleness. The contemptuous,