"The stag at eve had drunk his fill
Where danced the moon on Monan's rill,
And deep his midnight lair had made
In lone Glenartney's hazel shade."

Then opened the gates of romance, and with Fitz-James we drove the chase,
till--

"Few were the stragglers, following far,
That reached the lake of Vennachar,
And when the Brig of Turk was won,
The foremost horseman rode alone."

From that time, for months, there was usually a little volume of Scott in
one's pocket, in company with the miscellaneous collection of a boy's
treasures. Scott certainly took his fairy folk seriously, and the Mauth
Dog was rather a disagreeable companion to a small boy in wakeful hours.
{1} After this kind of introduction to Sir Walter, after learning one's
first lessons in history from the "Tales of a Grandfather," nobody, one
hopes, can criticise him in cold blood, or after the manner of Mr. Leslie
Stephen, who is not sentimental. Scott is not an author like another,
but our earliest known friend in letters; for, of course, we did not ask
who Shakespeare was, nor inquire about the private history of Madame
d'Aulnoy. Scott peopled for us the rivers and burnsides with his
reivers; the Fairy Queen came out of Eildon Hill and haunted Carterhaugh;
at Newark Tower we saw "the embattled portal arch"--

"Whose ponderous grate and massy bar
Had oft rolled back the tide of war,"--