blest origin. He was born in 1758, and passed the earlier part of his life in struggling (though with little success) against the toils and distresses of a peasant's life. Having been reduced by misfortunes in his humble career as a farmer, and also in some degree by indulgence in the passions accompanying so excitable and poetical a temperament, to the verge of ruin, he was upon the point of quitting his country in despair and emigrating to the West Indies, when the unequalled pathos, splendour, and originality of some of his lyrics struck many influential members of cultivated society, and the poet was induced to remain in Scotland. He now went to Edinburgh, where he reigned for some time the undisputed lion, the wonder of that literary capital. His conversation was as brilliant as his genius was pathetic and sublime, but, unfortunately for himself, the poet could not resist the fascinations of social indulgence, and the intoxication of universal applause. He retired again to the country, and, after fruitlessly struggling for some time as an agriculturist, he was obliged, in order to obtain bread for his family, to accept an humble situation in the office of Excise. This employment, so unfavourable both to habits of temperance and to literary occupation, only tended to precipitate the setting of this bright and comet-like intelligence: his constitution, worn out with excesses, passions, and anxieties, was completely broken up, and he died in 1796.

His works are singularly various and splendid; the greater part of them consists of songs, either completely original, or recastings of such compositions of older date: in performing this difficult task of altering and improving existing lyrics, in which a beautiful thought was often buried under a load of mean and vulgar expression, Burns exhibits a most exquisite delicacy and purity of taste, and an admirable ear for harmony. His own songs vary in tone and subject through every changing mood, from the sternest patriotism and the most agonising pathos to the broadest drollery: in all he is equally inimitable. Most of his finest works are written in his own Lowland dialect, and give a picture, at once familiar and ideal, of the feelings and sentiments of the peasant. It is the rustic heart, but glorified by passion, and elevated by a perpetual communing with nature. But he has also exhibited perfect mastery when writing pure English, and many admirable productions might be cited in which he has clothed the loveliest thoughts in the purest language. Consequently his genius was not obliged to depend upon the adventitious charm and prestige of a provincial dialect. There never perhaps existed a mind more truly and intensely poetical than that of Burns. In his verses to a Mountain Daisy, which he turned up with his plough in his reflections on destroying, in the same way, the nest of a fieldmouse, there is a vein of tenderness which no poet has ever surpassed. In the beautiful little poem To Mary in Heaven,' and in many

other short lyrics, he has condensed the whole history of love, its tender fears, its joys, its frenzy, its agonies, and its yet sublimer resignation, into the space of a dozen lines. No poet ever seems so sure of himself; none goes more directly and more certainly to the point; none is more muscular in his expression, encumbering the thought with no useless drapery of words, and trusting always for effect to nature, truth, and intensity of feeling. Consequently no poet more abounds in those short and picturelike phrases which at once present the object almost to our senses, and which no reflection could either imitate or improve. What can be more wonderfully condensed than his picture of a patriot warrior—

"Pressing forward red-wat-shod”?

it is absolutely Shakspearian.

But the religion in which Burns is-not perhaps the most supreme, but the most alone, is that of familiar humour, mingled with a kind of sly and quaint tenderness. Scottish external nature is in his poems represented in its every phase, in its every shade of variation; but he is yet more admirable when he delineates the interior life of his own thoughtful and moral countrymen. There have never been traced by the hand of man such full, such tender, such living picture of rustic life as Burns has left us. The half-serious halfhumorous tale of 'Tam o'Shanter,' with its fantastically terrific diablerie, the satiric gaiety of 'Holy Fair,' the 'Scotch Drink,' the Elegy on Matthew Henderson,' the 'Address to the De'il,' all bear witness to the wonderful diversity of his powers, to his deep sympathy with all that is noble and touching in rustic life, and to his intensely national vein of mingled tenderness and humour. The true poet is he who finds the most of beauty and of dignity in the universal feelings and interests of human life and increased wisdom and sympathy (the infallible attendant on increased wisdom) is rapidly tending to make all mankind echo the exclamation of Burns when he wept at the sight of a lovely and peasant-peopled scene: "The sight," he said, "of so many smoking cottages gave a pleasure to his mind, which none could understand who had not witnessed, like himself, the happiness and the worth which they contained." One of his most admirable poems, 'The Cotter's Saturday Night,' is nothing but an amplification of this profound and beautiful sentiment

CHAPTER XVII.

SCOTT AND SOUTHEY.

Walter Scott-The Lay of the Last Minstrel-Marmion-Lady of the Lake Lord of the Isles-Waverley-Guy Mannering-Antiquary-Tales of my Landlord-Ivanhoe-Monastery and Abbot-Kenilworth-Pirate-Fortunes of Nigel-Peveril-Quentin Durward-St. Ronan's Well-RedgauntletTales of the Crusaders-Woodstock-Chronicles of the Canongate--Anne of Geierstein. Robert Southey-Thalaba and Kehama-Madoc-Legendary Tales-Roderick-Prose Works and Miscellanies.

THERE is no author in the whole range of literature, ancient or modern, whose works exhibit so perfect an embodiment of united power and activity as is to be found in Walter Scott. He is as prolific as Lopé de Vega, as absolutely original as Homer. He was descended from one of the most powerful and ancient houses of Scotland; and though his father (a writer to the signet in Edinburgh) was rather an active and intelligent lawyer than a representative of Middle Age nobility, yet the spirit of clanship which still so strongly pervades Scottish society was enough to unite the poet in sentiment as in blood to the great and powerful family of Buccleugh. Having received in his childhood a slight injury, which rendered him during his whole life a little lame, though it did not ultimately affect the strength of a robust and athletic body, he passed some of his earliest years among the romantic scenery of his own beautiful countryscenery where every spot had been the theatre of warlike or necromantic tradition. Scott afterwards passed through a regular course of education, first at the High School and afterwards at the University of Edinburgh, where he appears, without distinguishing himself by any extraordinary triumphs, to have acquired the good opinion of his teachers, and to have become very popular among his comrades, partly by his stores of old legends, and not less by his frank, bold, and adventurous character. It is not easy to conceive a finer specimen of humanity than Scott. His frame was vigorous and manly, ever surpassing the ordinary size and strength; his features, though not classically regular, were animated and attractive; and his character was an admirable union of imagination, of good sense, and of good nature. Power, in short, and goodness were stamped upon the man, both within and without. On completing his education he became a member of the Scottish bar, and was ultimately appointed, through the recommendation of the head of his clan, the Duke of Buccleugh, sheriff of Selkirk, to which appointment were afterwards

added one or two others. As a lawyer his success, though not extraordinary, was respectable. The society of Edinburgh was at that time unusually rich in men of literary and philosophical accomplishments, and it was, moreover, enlivened and diversified by many relics of the political struggles of the '45-old Jacobite gentlemen, whose manners supplied the future novelist with many of his most admirable characters, and whose adventures furnished him with many a wild tale of bravery, persecution, and escape-the traditions of a romantic age which was rapidly passing away.

Henry Mackenzie, the author of "The Man of Feeling,' and one of the ornaments of Edinburgh literary society, had introduced into Scotland a taste for the ballad-poetry of Germany. It was from the study and admiration of Bürger and the minor lyrists that the English began to turn their attention to the Teutonic muse; and Scott translated the 'Lenore' and other small compositions, chiefly of that wild and spectral character which might have been expected to possess so much novelty for the British public. These translations, some of them executed with great spirit and fidelity (as for example the version of Goethe's 'Erl König'), were contributed by Scott to Lewis's 'Tales of Terror,' the first attempt to give specimens of German literature in England. After having, by the exercise of reason and good sense, recovered from an early lovesorrow, Scott married a young lady of the name of Carpenter, who was possessed of a small fortune, and retired to a cottage, where, in the very flower of his youth and surrounded by domestic happiness, he prepared for future glory by steady and uninterrupted labour.

From very early youth he had exhibited a most intense passion for the ballad-poetry in which his own country is even richer than England itself; and we know that in childhood his imagination had been lighted up by the repeated perusal of Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry'-that admirable collection which was not only the germ of the great romantic revolution in literature, but which has perhaps tended more than any book since Homer to inspire the youthful writer with a passion for natural unsophisticated sentiment and vivid description. After translating 'Goetz von Berlichingen,' Scott travelled over the Border district, collecting new stores of ballads from old peasants and wandering rhapsodists, and thus rescuing from oblivion some of the finest pictures of simple pathos and heroism, and many curious documents of the history of that interesting region: these were published in three volumes, entitled the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.' Nothing could be better calculated as a preparation for the future triumphs of the romantic poet and novelist of Scotland than this task of love; and the necessary antiquarian reading and investigation must have supplied him with an immense store of the materials he so well knew how to us He afterwards published another work of a

similar nature - a commentary on the singular poetical fragments attributed to Thomas of Erceldoune, said to have lived in the thirteenth century.

The first of that long and splendid line of poems whose glory was only to be effaced by the intenser splendour of his novels, was "The Lay of the Last Minstrel,' published in 1805, and received by the public with rapturous delight. In its plan, its versification, in the whole design and execution, this was a new and perfectly original production; the reader was presented with a picture, fresh, vigorous, vast, and brilliant as Nature herself. It is a tale of sorcery and chivalric adventure, as vivid and bright as a real poem of the Middle Ages, as faithful, as minute, as picturesque in its details; yet at the same time imbued with the finer sensibility of modern literature, and adorned with all the splendours of modern art. The tale is supposed to be related by a wandering minstrel, the last of a profession once so honoured; and the framing of the legend is at once exquisitely beautiful in itself, and admirably calculated to set off and relieve the narrative. The description of the aged and wandering minstrel,—the diffidence with which he begins his legend in the presence of the great lady, and tries to recall the inspiration of vanished days, and the glorious bursts of truly Homeric fire when he gets into the full tide of minstrel inspiration,-all this is as fine as it is original in conception. Each canto is appropriately and artfully introduced with some passage of description or reflection; and these introductions are among the most exquisite specimens of Scott's picturesque and enchanting style. The tale itself is not very well constructed, and, though many of the supernatural events are impressive, the character of the Goblin Dwarf is unnecessary to the plot, and generally felt to be a blemish. The detached scenes solemn, exciting, or gorgeous-are the real strength of the poem. The night-journey of Deloraine (an admirable embodiment of the rude mosstrooping borderer) to fulfil the command of the Lady of Branksome; the description of Melrose Abbey by moonlight; the scene of the opening of the tomb of Michael Scott, and the taking of the book of gramarie from the dead hand of the mighty wizard; the description of Lord Howard,-all these are absolutely unequalled in their particular manner. Most authors who have attempted to evoke the shades of buried ages raise them before our eyes, as Samuel was raised by the witch of Endor, rather like shadows than with the consistency of reality. Scott revivifies them; and, what is a still greater triumph of art, he puts the spectator into the condi tion of a contemporary: we not only see the things, but we see them as through the eyes of the Middle Ages. The versification of this poem, and of most of its successors, consists principally of the rhymed octosyllabic couplet, founded on the favourite measure of the Norman Trouvères. This measure, peculiarly well adapted to