SCOTT'S MATURER POEMS.


Scott's genius flowered late. _Cadyow Castle_, the first of his poems,
I think, that has indisputable genius plainly stamped on its terse and
fiery lines, was composed in 1802, when he was already thirty-one
years of age. It was in the same year that he wrote the first canto of
his first great romance in verse, _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, a
poem which did not appear till 1805, when he was thirty-four. The
first canto (not including the framework, of which the aged harper is
the principal figure) was written in the lodgings to which he was
confined for a fortnight in 1802, by a kick received from a horse on
Portobello sands, during a charge of the Volunteer Cavalry in which
Scott was cornet. The poem was originally intended to be included in
the _Border Minstrelsy_, as one of the studies in the antique style,
but soon outgrew the limits of such a study both in length and in the
freedom of its manner. Both the poorest and the best parts of _The
Lay_ were in a special manner due to Lady Dalkeith (afterwards Duchess
of Buccleugh), who suggested it, and in whose honour the poem was
written. It was she who requested Scott to write a poem on the legend
of the goblin page, Gilpin Horner, and this Scott attempted,--and, so
far as the goblin himself was concerned, conspicuously failed. He
himself clearly saw that the story of this unmanageable imp was both
confused and uninteresting, and that in fact he had to extricate
himself from the original groundwork of the tale, as from a regular
literary scrape, in the best way he could. In a letter to Miss Seward,
Scott says,--"At length the story appeared so uncouth that I was fain
to put it into the mouth of my old minstrel, lest the nature of it
should be misunderstood, and I should be suspected of setting up a new
school of poetry, instead of a feeble attempt to imitate the old. In