intervals between drill he would sometimes ride his charger at full
speed up and down on the sands of Portobello within spray of the
wave, while his mind was at work on such lines as -


"They close, in clouds of smoke and dust,
With sword-sway and with lance's thrust;
And such a yell was there,
Of sudden and portentous birth,
As if men fought in upper earth,
And fiends in upper air."


"Marmion" was published early in the year 1808; its first edition of
two thousand, in the form, then usual, of a quarto volume, priced at
a guinea and a half, was sold in a month. Then came the editions in
octavo, of which there were twelve, between 1808 and 1825.

Francis Jeffrey, in the Edinburgh Review, complained of anti-
Scottish feeling, and otherwise criticised his friend's work in a
way that alienated Scott, not from Jeffrey, but from the Review, and
opened to John Murray a prospect of securing Scott for a contributor
to another Review, the Quarterly, which he would found as a
representative of other political opinions with which Scott would be
more in accord. "Marmion" thus has a place in the story of the
origin of the Quarterly Review. Of the great popularity of
"Marmion," Scott himself said at the time that it gave him "such a
heeze that he had almost lost his footing." The Letters introducing
the several Books are, in all Scott's verse, perhaps the poems that
most perfectly present to us his own personality. They form no part