In the meantime, a rich uncle died without children, and Scott’s share of the property enabled him, in 1804, to rent from his cousin, Major-General Sir James Russell, the pretty property called Ashestiel,—­a cottage and farm on the banks of the Tweed, altogether a beautiful place, where he lived when discharging his duties of sheriff of Selkirkshire.  He has celebrated the charms of Ashestiel in the canto introduction to “Marmion.”  His income at this time amounted to about L1000 a year, which gave him a position among the squires of the neighborhood, complete independence, and leisure to cultivate his taste.  His fortune was now made:  with poetic fame besides, and powerful friends, he was a man every way to be envied.

“The Lay of the Last Minstrel” placed Scott among the three great poets of Scotland, for originality and beauty of rhyme.  It is not marked by pathos or by philosophical reflections.  It is a purely descriptive poem of great vivacity and vividness, easy to read, and true to nature.  It is a tale of chivalry, and is to poetry what Froissart’s “Chronicles” are to history.  Nothing exactly like it had before appeared in English literature.  It appealed to all people of romantic tastes, and was reproachless from a moral point of view.  It was a book for a lady’s bower, full of chivalric sentiments and stirring incidents, and of unflagging interest from beginning to end,—­partly warlike and partly monastic, describing the adventures of knights and monks.  It deals with wizards, harpers, dwarfs, priests, warriors, and noble dames.  It sings of love and wassailings, of gentle ladies’ tears, of castles and festal halls, of pennons and lances,—­

     “Of ancient deeds, so long forgot,
      Of feuds whose memory was not,
      Of forests now laid waste and bare,
      Of towers which harbor now the hare.”

In “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” there is at least one immortal stanza which would redeem the poem even if otherwise mediocre.  How few poets can claim as much as this!  Very few poems live except for some splendid passages which cannot be forgotten, and which give fame.  I know of nothing, even in Burns, finer than the following lines:—­

     “Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
      Who never to himself hath said,
        This is my own, my native land! 
      Whose heart hath ne’er within him burned,
      As home his footsteps he hath turned
        From wandering on a foreign strand? 
      If such there breathe, go, mark him well! 
      For him no minstrel raptures swell;
      High though his titles, proud his name,
      Boundless his wealth as wish can claim,—­
      Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
      The wretch, concentred all in self,
      Living shall forfeit fair renown,
      And, doubly dying, shall go down
      To the vile dust from whence he sprung,
      Unwept, unhonored, and unsung.”