Scott was attracted by the romantic side of German literature.  His first published poem was a translation made in 1796 from Buerger’s wild ballad, Leonora.  He followed this up with versions of the same poet’s Wilde Jaeger, of Goethe’s violent drama of feudal life, Goetz Von Berlichingen, and with other translations from the German, of a similar class.  On his horseback trips through the border, where he studied the primitive manners of the Liddesdale people, and took down old ballads from the recitation of ancient dames and cottagers, he amassed the materials for his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 1802.  But the first of his original poems was the Lay of the Last Minstrel, published in 1805, and followed, in quick sucession by Marmion, the Lady of the Lake, Rokeby, the Lord of the Isles, and a volume of ballads and lyrical pieces, all issued during the years 1806-1814.  The popularity won by this series of metrical romances was immediate and wide-spread.  Nothing so fresh or so brilliant had appeared in English poetry for nearly two centuries.  The reader was hurried along through scenes of rapid action, whose effect was heightened by wild landscapes and picturesque manners.  The pleasure was a passive one.  There was no deep thinking to perplex, no subtler beauties to pause upon; the feelings were stirred pleasantly, but not deeply; the effect was on the surface.  The spell employed was novelty—­or, at most, wonder—­and the chief emotion aroused was breathless interest in the progress of the story.  Carlyle said that Scott’s genius was in extenso, rather than in intenso, and that its great praise was its healthiness.  This is true of his verse, but not altogether so of his prose, which exhibits deeper qualities.  Some of Scott’s most perfect poems, too, are his shorter ballads, like Jock o’ Hazeldean, and Proud Maisie is in the Wood, which have a greater intensity and compression than his metrical tales.

From 1814 to 1831 Scott wrote and published the Waverley novels, some thirty in number; if we consider the amount of work done, the speed with which it was done, and the general average of excellence maintained, perhaps the most marvelous literary feat on record.  The series was issued anonymously, and takes its name from the first number:  Waverley, or ’Tis Sixty Years Since.  This was founded upon the rising of the clans, in 1745, in support of the Young Pretender, Charles Edward Stuart, and it revealed to the English public that almost foreign country which lay just across their threshold, the Scottish Highlands.  The Waverley novels remain, as a whole, unequaled as historical fiction, although here and there a single novel, like George Eliot’s Romola, or Thackeray’s Henry Esmond, or Kingsley’s Hypatia, may have attained a place beside the best of them.  They were a novelty when they appeared.  English prose fiction had