irregularity. Scott's romances in prose and verse are still so
universally known as to make any review of them here individually an
impertinence. Their impact on contemporary Europe was instantaneous and
wide-spread. There is no record elsewhere in literary history of such
success. Their immense sales, the innumerable editions and translations
and imitations of them, are matters of familiar knowledge. Poem followed
poem, and novel, novel in swift and seemingly exhaustless succession, and
each was awaited by the public with unabated expectancy. Here once more
was a poet who could tell the world a story that it wanted to hear; a poet

"Such as it had
In the ages glad,
Long ago."

The Homeric[33] quality which criticism has attributed or denied to these
poems is really there. The difference, the inferiority is obvious of
course. They are not in the grand style; they are epic on a lower plane,
ballad-epic, bastard-epic perhaps, but they are epic. No English verse
narrative except Chaucer's ranks, as a whole, above Scott's. Chaucer's
disciple, William Morris, has an equal flow and continuity, and keeps a
more even level of style; but his story-telling is languid compared with
Scott's. The latter is greater in the dynamic than in the static
department--in scenes of rapid action and keen excitement. His show
passages are such as the fight in the Trosachs, Flodden Field, William of
Deloraine's ride to Melrose, the trial of Constance, the muster on the
Borough Moor, Marmion's defiance to Douglas, the combat of James and
Roderick Dhu, the summons of the fiery cross, and the kindling of the
need-fires--those romantic equivalents of the lampadephoroi in the
"Agamemnon."