eagle. Yet the result was happy on the whole; for she had a thoroughly
kindly nature, and a true heart. Within ten days before her death,
Scott enters in his diary:--"Still welcoming me with a smile, and
asserting she is better." She was not the ideal wife for Scott; but
she loved him, sunned herself in his prosperity, and tried to bear his
adversity cheerfully. In her last illness she would always reproach
her husband and children for their melancholy faces, even when that
melancholy was, as she well knew, due to the approaching shadow of her
own death.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 8: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ix. 183-4.]

[Footnote 9: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, viii. 273.]




CHAPTER IV.

EARLIEST POETRY AND BORDER MINSTRELSY.


Scott's first serious attempt in poetry was a version of Bürger's
_Lenore_, a spectre-ballad of the violent kind, much in favour in
Germany at a somewhat earlier period, but certainly not a specimen of
the higher order of imaginative genius. However, it stirred Scott's
youthful blood, and made him "wish to heaven he could get a skull and
two cross-bones!" a modest desire, to be expressed with so much