hard study, they found they had produced only six lines between them.  “It is plain,” said the unconscious author to his fellow-labourer, “that you and I need never think of getting our living by writing poetry!” In a year or so after this, he set to work, and poured out quarto upon quarto, as if they had been drops of water.  As to the rest, and compared with true and great poets, our Scottish Minstrel is but “a metre ballad-monger.”  We would rather have written one song of Burns, or a single passage in Lord Byron’s Heaven and Earth, or one of Wordsworth’s “fancies and good-nights,” than all his epics.  What is he to Spenser, over whose immortal, ever-amiable verse beauty hovers and trembles, and who has shed the purple light of Fancy, from his ambrosial wings, over all nature?  What is there of the might of Milton, whose head is canopied in the blue serene, and who takes us to sit with him there?  What is there (in his ambling rhymes) of the deep pathos of Chaucer?  Or of the o’er-informing power of Shakespear, whose eye, watching alike the minutest traces of characters and the strongest movements of passion, “glances from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,” and with the lambent flame of genius, playing round each object, lights up the universe in a robe of its own radiance?  Sir Walter has no voluntary power of combination:  all his associations (as we said before) are those of habit or of tradition.  He is a mere narrative and descriptive poet, garrulous of the old time.  The definition of his poetry is a pleasing superficiality.

Not so of his NOVELS AND ROMANCES.  There we turn over a new leaf—­another and the same—­the same in matter, but in form, in power how different!  The author of Waverley has got rid of the tagging of rhymes, the eking out of syllables, the supplying of epithets, the colours of style, the grouping of his characters, and the regular march of events, and comes to the point at once, and strikes at the heart of his subject, without dismay and without disguise.  His poetry was a lady’s waiting-maid, dressed out in cast-off finery:  his prose is a beautiful, rustic nymph, that, like Dorothea in Don Quixote, when she is surprised with dishevelled tresses bathing her naked feet in the brook, looks round her, abashed at the admiration her charms have excited!  The grand secret of the author’s success in these latter productions is that he has completely got rid of the trammels of authorship; and torn off at one rent (as Lord Peter got rid of so many yards of lace in the Tale of a Tub) all the ornaments of fine writing and worn-out sentimentality.  All is fresh, as from the hand of nature:  by going a century or two back and laying the scene in a remote and uncultivated district, all becomes new and startling in the present advanced period.—­Highland manners, characters, scenery, superstitions, Northern dialect and costume, the wars, the religion, and politics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, give a