the “Morte Darthur,” on the second sight, on fairies and witches; extracts from Scottish chronicles, from the Books of Adjournal, from Aubrey, and old Glanvil of superstitious memory; tables of the Moeso-Gothic, Anglo-Saxon, and Runic alphabets and transcripts relating to the history of the Stuarts.  In the autumn or early winter of that year, a class of six or seven young men was formed at Edinburgh for the study of German, and Scott joined it.  In his own account of the matter he says that interest in German literature was first aroused in Scotland by a paper read before the Royal Society of Edinburgh in April, 1788, by Henry Mackenzie, the “Addison of the North,” and author of that most sentimental fictions, “The Man of Feeling.”  “The literary persons of Edinburgh were then first made aware of the existence of works of genius in a language cognate with the English, and possessed of the same manly force of expressions; they learned at the same time that the taste which dictated the German compositions was of a kind as nearly allied to the English as their language; those who were from their youth accustomed to admire Shakspere and Milton became acquainted for the first time with a race of poets who had the same lofty ambition to spurn the flaming boundaries of the universe and investigate the realms of Chaos and old Night; and of dramatists who, disclaiming the pedantry of the unities, sought, at the expense of occasional improbabilities and extravagance, to present life on the stage in its scenes of wildest contrast, and in all its boundless variety of character. . .  Their fictitious narratives, their ballad poetry, and other branches of their literature which are particularly apt to bear the stamp of the extravagant and the supernatural, began also to occupy the attention of the British literati.”  Scott’s German studies were much assisted by Alexander Frazer Tytler, whose version of Schiller’s “Robbers” was one of the earliest English translations from the German theater.[20]

In the autumn of 1794 Miss Aikin, afterward Mrs. Barbauld, entertained a party at Dugald Stewart’s by reading a translation of Buerger’s ghastly ballad “Lenore.”  The translation was by William Taylor of Norwich; it had not yet been published, and Miss Aikin read it from a manuscript copy.  Scott was not present, but his friend Mr. Cranstoun described the performance to him; and he was so much impressed by his description that he borrowed a volume of Burger’s poems from his young kinswoman by marriage, Mrs. Scott of Harden, a daughter of Count Bruehl of Martkirchen, formerly Saxon ambassador at London, who had a Scotchwoman for his second wife, the dowager Countess of Egremont.  Scott set to work in 1795 to make a translation of the ballad for himself, and succeeded so well in pleasing his friends that he had a few copies struck off for private circulation in the spring of 1796.  In the autumn of the same year he published his version under the title “William and Helen,” together