If

awakening poetical curiosity, but nothing more. their verse violated the existing canons of taste, it was from no deep-seated design on their part to overthrow those canons, but simply because their natural bent in writing happened to lie outside of them. If it had happened to lie within them, they would have followed it, at any rate the lettered Thomson would have followed it, as closely as Pope followed the artificial manner that he inherited from Dryden. Still they were not without influence upon English Verse, for tracing its main stream as it meanders along lazily through the eighteenth century we detect from time to time the pulsation of fresh currents therein. We are conscious of them in Somerville's Chace (1735), Shenstone's Schoolmistress (1742), Thomson's Castle of Indolence (1748), and Gray's Elegy (1751). Whether the contemporary readers of these poems compared them with other poems of the time, and accepted them, or rejected them, as they happened to like or dislike them, we have no positive means of knowing, for with the exception of the Elegy, which at once established itself in popular favor, they excited no critical comment. We find them in a poetic literature to which they are dissimilar, and we conclude that a change has come over this literature which accounts for their dissimilarity, and that they represent this change, whether they originated it or not. One need but glance at the history of English Verse to see that it was not the same in the seventeenth century as in the eighteenth, and that it was not quite the same in the second quarter of the latter as in the first. The decadence of the spirit of false classicism began with Thom

son's Winter, and closed with Cowper's Task. What the English poets learned in the intervening half century was to discard the practice of Pope and Boileau, who compounded poetry as apothecaries compounded medicines, after authoritative recipes, and trust to nature. They learned to shut their books, and look into themselves.

There was one book, however, of which they did not think much, but which was read with pleasure and profit by their children, and that was Percy's Reliques. Scott always remembered the spot where he read the volumes for the first time. It was beneath a huge plantanus-tree, in the ruins of what had been intended for an old-fashioned arbor in the garden of his Aunt Janet at Kelso. "The summer day sped onward so fast that, notwithstanding the sharp appetite of thirteen, I forgot the hour of dinner, was sought for with anxiety, and was still found entranced in my intellectual banquet. To read and to remember was in this instance the same thing, and henceforth I overwhelmed my school-fellows, and all who would hearken to me, with tragical recitations from the ballads of Bishop Percy. The first time, too, I could scrape a few shillings together, which were not common occurrences with me, I bought unto myself a copy of these beloved volumes; nor do I believe I ever read a book half so frequently, or with half the enthusiasm." Another English poet, whose family was settled in the reign of Edward the Third at Peniston, near Doncaster, the scene of the combat described in The Dragon of Wantley, and one of whose ancestors was stated in the Notes to have been a cousin of the Dragon (Sir Francis

Wortley), Wordsworth maintained that the Reliques were next in importance in English Verse to Thomson's Seasons, and pointed out in one of his Prefaces that while Dr. Johnson and the little senate to which he gave laws succeeded in making them an object of contempt, Bürger and other able writers of Germany were translating, or imitating them, and composing, with the aid of the inspiration thence derived, ballads which were the delight of the German nation. They were read with avidity by Bürger in his young manhood, as well as by the Göttingen circle of poets with whom he was affiliated, and their influence was manifest in his ballads, notably in Ellenore, which was published only nine years later than the Reliques, and at once became popular. If the old ballads in Percy inspired Bürger to write this ballad, a translation of this ballad, which was read in manuscript by Mrs. Barbauld at a party in Edinburgh, and of which Scott learned through the imperfect recollection of a friend who had heard it, inspired him to obtain the original, and to spend a night in translating it himself, and by awakening his early love of poetry, and with it the ambition to excel therein, made him a poet. He crossed the invisible threshold between the world of Prose and the world of Verse in his twenty-sixth year (1796), bearing in his hands a thin quarto containing his translation of two of Bürger's ballads, Ellenore, which he Englished into Lenore, and The Wild Huntsman. That there was poetic vitality in the prosaic eighteenth century was proved by the Reliques, which were followed in England by twenty-eight similar collections before the century closed, and by the profound

impression they made in Germany, where they helped to create a school of balladists. What they were to Scott in his boyhood he has told us. What they were to him in his early manhood, when they were recalled to his memory by the ballads of Bürger, his translations from Bürger show us. What they were to him at a later period we see by turning to his poetical writings, and noting the order in which they were written. After the Bürger ballads he wrote, within the next three years, the ballads of Glenfinlas, The Eve of St. John, The Grey Brothers, and translated The Fire King. Then came the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion, The Lady of the Lake, Rokeby, The Lord of the Isles, and, latest of all, Harold the Dauntless. The literary inspiration of these writings was the old ballads collected by Bishop Percy and his successors, and the old metrical romances of which some of these ballads were undoubtedly reminiscences, while others may have been the original germs. We have in Scott the last of the race of English and Scottish balladists, the last of the kings of song and story,-lords paramount of the enchanted world of Romance. He is the Lau

reate of Chivalry.

Another English poet, of whom we have already spoken, and whom we usually associate with the immortals of the nineteenth century, appeared, like Scott, in the last decade of the eighteenth century, but, unlike Scott, in the livery which the lackeys of Pope had worn threadbare. Wordsworth's first poetical ventures, which were published three years before Scott's translations from Bürger, were An Evening

Walk-an attempt to paint a series of landscape views in his own country, and Descriptive Sketches, an attempt to paint the scenery of the Alps, among which he had lately made a pedestrian tour with a college friend. The most that can be said of these productions is that they are fairly well written, and that there are touches of natural description in them which could only have been the result of actual observation. A copy of the Descriptive Sketches fell into the hands of a young man in Cambridge, who was charmed with them, and who declared years afterward that seldom, if ever, was the emergence of an original poetic genius above the literary horizon more evidently announced than in these same Sketches. This young man was a poet himself, and about this time was writing Songs to the Pixies, verses on Roses, and Kisses, an Address to a Young Ass, and other little pieces. Being in love, or debt, or both, he suddenly left college, and went up to London, where he was soon reduced to want. Το alleviate this prosaic misfortune, he enlisted as a private in the 15th Light Dragoons, which were then stationed at Reading, and during his four months' continuance in the awkward squad it is hard to say which was the most to be pitied,-he, or his horse. A chance recognition in the street made his whereabouts known to his family, who procured his release. Two or three months later he went to Oxford, where he made the acquaintance of another poet, whom he met again at Bristol, and by whom he was introduced to a third poet, who had recently taken to himself a wife, which wife had two pretty unmarried sisters, of one of whom he became at once enamored, his friend being