his poetical heroines would the reader break a lance so soon as for Jeanie Deans?  What Lady of the Lake can compare with the beautiful Rebecca?  We believe the late Mr. John Scott went to his death-bed (though a painful and premature one) with some degree of satisfaction, inasmuch as he had penned the most elaborate panegyric on the Scotch Novels that had as yet appeared!—­The Epics are not poems, so much as metrical romances.  There is a glittering veil of verse thrown over the features of nature and of old romance.  The deep incisions into character are “skinned and filmed over”—­the details are lost or shaped into flimsy and insipid decorum; and the truth of feeling and of circumstance is translated into a tinkling sound, a tinsel common-place.  It must be owned, there is a power in true poetry that lifts the mind from the ground of reality to a higher sphere, that penetrates the inert, scattered, incoherent materials presented to it, and by a force and inspiration of its own, melts and moulds them into sublimity and beauty.  But Sir Walter (we contend, under correction) has not this creative impulse, this plastic power, this capacity of reacting on his first impressions.  He is a learned, a literal, a matter-of-fact expounder of truth or fable:[B] he does not soar above and look down upon his subject, imparting his own lofty views and feelings to his descriptions of nature—­he relies upon it, is raised by it, is one with it, or he is nothing.  A poet is essentially a maker; that is, he must atone for what he loses in individuality and local resemblance by the energies and resources of his own mind.  The writer of whom we speak is deficient in these last.  He has either not the faculty or not the will to impregnate his subject by an effort of pure invention.  The execution also is much upon a par with the more ephemeral effusions of the press.  It is light, agreeable, effeminate, diffuse.  Sir Walter’s Muse is a Modern Antique.  The smooth, glossy texture of his verse contrasts happily with the quaint, uncouth, rugged materials of which it is composed; and takes away any appearance of heaviness or harshness from the body of local traditions and obsolete costume.  We see grim knights and iron armour; but then they are woven in silk with a careless, delicate hand, and have the softness of flowers.  The poet’s figures might be compared to old [C] tapestries copied on the finest velvet:—­they are not like Raphael’s Cartoons, but they are very like Mr. Westall’s drawings, which accompany, and are intended to illustrate them.  This facility and grace of execution is the more remarkable, as a story goes that not long before the appearance of the Lay of the Last Minstrel Sir Walter (then Mr.) Scott, having, in the company of a friend, to cross the Frith of Forth in a ferry-boat, they proposed to beguile the time by writing a number of verses on a given subject, and that at the end of an hour’s