May shun the tell-tale ray," etc.[29]

It is possible to name single pieces like "The Ancient Mariner," and "La
Belle Dame sans Merci," and "Rose-Mary," of a rarer imaginative quality
and a more perfect workmanship than Scott often attains; yet upon the
whole and in the mass, no modern balladry matches the success of his.
The Pre-Raphaelites were deliberate artists, consciously reproducing an
extinct literary form; but Scott had lived himself back into the social
conditions out of which ballad poetry was born. His best pieces of this
class do not strike us as imitations but as original, spontaneous, and
thoroughly alive. Such are, to particularise but a few, "Jock o'
Hazeldean," "Cadyow Castle," on the assassination of the Regent Murray;
"The Reiver's Wedding," a fragment preserved in Lockhart's "Life";
"Elspeth's Ballad" ("The Red Harlow") in "The Antiquary"; Madge
Wildfire's songs in "The Heart of Mid-Lothian," and David Gellatley's in
"Waverley"; besides the other scraps and snatches of minstrelsy too
numerous for mention, sown through the novels and longer poems. For in
spite of detraction, Walter Scott remains one of the foremost British
lyrists. In Mr. Palgrave's "Treasury" he is represented by a larger
number of selections than either Milton, Byron, Burns, Campbell, Keats,
or Herrick; making an easy fourth to Wordsworth, Shakspere, and Shelley.
And in marked contrast with Shelley especially, it is observable of
Scott's contributions to this anthology that they are not the utterance
of the poet's personal emotion; they are coronachs, pibrochs, gathering
songs, narrative ballads, and the like--objective, dramatic lyrics
touched always with the light of history or legend.

The step from ballad to ballad-epic is an easy one, and it was by a
natural evolution that the one passed into the other in Scott's hands.
"The Lay of the Last Minstrel" (1805) was begun as a ballad on the local