side of his industrious activity, has many striking qualities. It is nervous, idiomatic, and capable, as at the close of Nelson, of real, if somewhat subdued, eloquence. His chief works in this field-apart from the laborious History of Brazil (1810-19)-are the Life of Nelson (1813), the Life of Wesley (1820), and the Life and Letters of Cowper (1833-37). The two first of these are skilful, though perhaps not very accurate, portraits of commanding figures; the last, so far as the jealousy of others allowed him to make it so, is a thoroughly sound and workmanlike performance.

Scott.

We turn to a far greater and more unchallenged fame: that of Scott (1771-1832). Born in the year between Wordsworth and Coleridge, Scott is the only writer of that generation whose work rivals theirs in fruitfulness and importance. It is unfortunately only the less enduring part of it that we are concerned with in this volume; his achievement in prose-romance belongs to the following period.

Scott divides with Coleridge the chief place among the apostles of romance. The subtler, more impalpNew issues able workings of the romantic spirit he of romance. leaves on one side; they may almost be said to have lain beyond his ken. But wherever romance touches the outer experience of man, wherever it has shown itself potent to spur him to action or to mould his history, there, whatever shape it may have taken-adventure, heroism, supernatural awe,- Scott was more keenly and more instinct

ively alive to it than any of his contemporaries -perhaps than any man in the records of literature. And, as could not be said of all his contemporaries, with him the romantic instinct is wholly unforced and unaffected. It is the fusion of these two elements-a craving for what is remote, mysterious, and even fantastic on the one hand, and the practical sense, the love of stir and action on the other-which makes the distinctive colour of his genius, and which, thanks to the magic of that genius, gave an entirely new direction to the whole current of romance. Till the appearance of Scott, it was almost exclusively the subtler, more mystical elements of romance which had come to the surface. It was so with Blake, it was so with Coleridge. With Southey, it is true, the vein of adventure had declared itself; but not in a form which either had, or deserved to have, a wide acceptance. And, obvious as are the affinities between Scott and Southey, the differences are far stronger and more significant. To Southey, adventure was a thing to be sought for its own sake; and the more fantastic, the more highly spiced, the better. To Scott, after his first random beginnings, after the skull and cross-bones had been put aside, adventure was little, unless he had convinced himself that it was adventure which had, or at the least might have, happened in the actual past of history; and nothing, unless it called out the qualities which he most valued in man's nature-energy, courage, loyalty, and the other virtues belonging to the stock of chivalry. To him, romance was bound up with the historical past,

commonly the past of his own country; it was bound up with a very definite ideal of human nature. Both in its source and in its motive power it rested on action and on fact. It was the deeds of the mosstroopers, the clash and strain of Border warfare, that first stirred his imagination. And, though in his later and nobler work the horizon is markedly widened, it was still from the history of his own country, from a past well remembered and still lingering in wellknown survivals of the present, that he drew his happiest inspirations. In the phantom world of Blake and Coleridge, in the vagrant inventions of Southey, he could never have been at home.

The Scott of the "Scotch Novels" grew naturally from the Scott of the Border Minstrelsy. It is with the latter, however, that we are exclusively concerned -with the translations, collections, and original poems which fall between 1796 and 1814.

The first ventures of Scott were in a strain rather curiously at variance with that which he was to make his own, but none the less significant. These Early work. were the ringing versions of Bürger's two most famous ballads, Lenore and The Wild Huntsman (1796), appropriately contributed to the "hobgoblin repast" spread before the public in Lewis' Tales of Wonder. From such fantastic and gruesome subjects he was soon to turn away. But the choice of them for his earliest effort is proof, if proof were needed, of his irrepressible bent towards the world of romance; while in the slightly mechanical devices, and the somewhat metallic ring, of the verse, we are perhaps

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entitled to see his equally irrepressible bent toward the world of action and realities. There is certainly much more of the popular ballad in them, there is more of the tramp and crash of the moss-trooper, than there is in the originals of Bürger.

Goethe.

It was in 1799 that Scott fairly entered on his inheritance. In Glenfinlas and The Eve of Saint John, Scott and his first original poems, he takes his theme from the legends of his own country, in the latter case from places familiar to him from childhood. And though the supernatural still plays a far larger part than in his maturer work, it is in a comparatively subdued key. The translation of Goethe's Götz in the same year marks a further step in advance. Here he first reveals the passionate interest in the actual past, the past of the middle ages, which was to inspire all that is most notable in his poetry, and no inconsiderable share of his prose romance. It was through Goethe, the father of mediævalism in Germany, that he first came to a full sense of his own mission. But what in the one was no more than a passing phase, in the other was the passion of a lifetime.

Not that there are not other differences too. For Goethe the middle ages presented a glowing contrast to all that fretted him in the life of his own day. And Götz, in its own way, is hardly less of a satire on "this ink-slobbering century" than Die Räuber. Of this satiric intention there is no trace in Scott. That the ideals of the middle ages were not those of the eighteenth century, he knew as well as any man.

But it never occurred to him to put the two in competition, and in his picture of the past there is no touch of satire against the present. He is far too much in love with his inward vision to have leisure for comparing it with the realities at his gate. So it comes that he is far more whole-hearted than Goethe in his devotion to the past, and that his picture of it is far more complete. Partly from the necessities of the dramatic form, partly from natural inclination, Goethe fixed on one moment in the deaththroes of medieval life-the struggle of individual freedom against the advancing tide of officialism and routine. Scott gives no such one-sided picture. He includes the whole web of feudal existence-its freedom, its adventure, its romance, its chivalry, its superstition-in his admiration, and finds room for them all in his poetry. And the air, if less charged with tragedy than in Goethe's play, is keener and more bracing.

Minstrelsy.

The first result of Scott's self-consecration to the middle ages was the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802), over which, with help from Leyden and others, he had been busy for some years. This great collection consists of three parts, historical, romantic, and modern imitations, in the last of which Glenfinlas and other ballads by Scott himself are incorporated. It also contains dissertations of great value connected with Border history and the popular beliefs of the Scots. The Minstrelsy is avowedly modelled on Percy's Reliques. But a glance is enough to show how greatly the standard