somewhat declined since the time of Fielding and Goldsmith.  There were truthful, though rather tame, delineations of provincial life, like Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, 1811, and Pride and Prejudice, 1813; or Maria Edgeworth’s Popular Tales, 1804.  On the other hand, there were Gothic romances, like the Monk of Matthew Gregory Lewis, to whose Tales of Wonder some of Scott’s translations from the German had been contributed; or like Anne Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho.  The great original of this school of fiction was Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, 1765; an absurd tale of secret trap-doors, subterranean vaults, apparitions of monstrous mailed figures and colossal helmets, pictures that descend from their frames, and hollow voices that proclaim the ruin of ancient families.

Scott used the machinery of romance, but he was not merely a romancer, or an historical novelist even, and it is not, as Carlyle implies, the buff-belts and jerkins which principally interest us in his heroes. Ivanhoe and Kenilworth and the Talisman are, indeed, romances pure and simple, and very good romances at that.  But, in novels such as Rob Roy, the Antiquary, the Heart of Midlothian, and the Bride of Lammermoor, Scott drew from contemporary life, and from his intimate knowledge of Scotch character.  The story is there, with its entanglement of plot and its exciting adventures, but there are also, as truly as in Shakspere, though not in the same degree, the observation of life, the knowledge of men, the power of dramatic creation.  No writer awakens in his readers a warmer personal affection than Walter Scott, the brave, honest, kindly gentleman; the noblest figure among the literary men of his generation.

Another Scotch poet was Thomas Campbell, whose Pleasures of Hope, 1799, was written in Pope’s couplet, and in the stilted diction of the 18th century. Gertrude of Wyoming, 1809, a long narrative poem in Spenserian stanza, is untrue to the scenery and life of Pennsylvania, where its scene is laid.  But Campbell turned his rhetorical manner and his clanking, martial verse to fine advantage in such pieces as Hohenlinden, Ye Mariners of England, and the Battle of the Baltic.  These have the true lyric fire, and rank among the best English war-songs.

When Scott was asked why he had left off writing poetry, he answered, “Byron bet me.”  George Gordon Byron (1788-1824) was a young man of twenty-four when, on his return from a two years’ sauntering through Portugal, Spain, Albania, Greece, and the Levant, he published, in the first two cantos of Childe Harold, 1812, a sort of poetic itinerary of his experiences and impressions.  The poem took, rather to its author’s surprise, who said that he woke one morning and found himself famous. Childe Harold opened a new field to poetry: