is far better than any ghostly touch in it; so, too, every one will
remember how spirited a rider is the white Lady of Avenel, in _The
Monastery_, and how vigorously she takes fords,--as vigorously as the
sheriff himself, who was very fond of fords. On the whole, Scott was
too sunny and healthy-minded for a ghost-seer; and the skull and
cross-bones with which he ornamented his "den" in his father's house,
did not succeed in tempting him into the world of twilight and cobwebs
wherein he made his first literary excursion. His _William and Helen_,
the name he gave to his translation of Bürger's _Lenore_, made in
1795, was effective, after all, more for its rapid movement, than for
the weirdness of its effects.

If, however, it was the raw preternaturalism of such ballads as
Bürger's which first led Scott to test his own powers, his genius soon
turned to more appropriate and natural subjects. Ever since his
earliest college days he had been collecting, in those excursions of
his into Liddesdale and elsewhere, materials for a book on _The
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border_; and the publication of this work,
in January, 1802 (in two volumes at first), was his first great
literary success. The whole edition of eight hundred copies was sold
within the year, while the skill and care which Scott had devoted to
the historical illustration of the ballads, and the force and spirit
of his own new ballads, written in imitation of the old, gained him at
once a very high literary name. And the name was well deserved. The
_Border Minstrelsy_ was more commensurate _in range_ with the genius
of Scott, than even the romantic poems by which it was soon followed,
and which were received with such universal and almost unparalleled
delight. For Scott's _Border Minstrelsy_ gives more than a glimpse of
all his many great powers--his historical industry and knowledge, his
masculine humour, his delight in restoring the vision of the "old,