And this is how Scott writes them: 

    “He clenched his set teeth and his gauntleted hand,
    He stretched with one buffet that page on the sand. . . 
    For down came the Templars like Cedron in flood,
    And dyed their long lances in Saracen blood.”

It is no more possible to take Monk Lewis seriously than to take Horace Walpole seriously.  They are both like children telling ghost-stories in the dark and trying to make themselves shudder.  Lewis was even frivolous enough to compose paradies on his own ballads.  A number of these facetiae—­“The Mud King,” “Giles Jollup the Grave and Brown Sally Green,” etc.—­diversify his “Tales of Wonder.”

Scott soon found better work for his hands to do than translating German ballads and melodramas; but in later years he occasionally went back to these early sources of romantic inspiration.  Thus his poem “The Noble Moringer” was taken from a “Sammlung Deutscher Volkslieder” published at Berlin in 1807 by Busching and Von der Hagen.  In 1799 he had made a rifacimento of a melodrama entitles “Der Heilige Vehme” in Veit Weber’s “Sagen der Vorzeit.”  This he found among his papers thirty years after (1829) and printed in “The Keepsake,” under the title of “The House of Aspen.”  Its most telling feature is the description of the Vehm-Gericht or Secret Tribunal, but it has little importance.  In his “Historic Survey,” Taylor said that “Goetz von Berlichingen” was “translated into English in 1799 at Edinburgh, by Wm. Scott, Advocate; no doubt the same person who, under the poetical but assumed name of Walter, had since become the most extensively popular of the British writers”!  This amazing statement is explained by a blunder on the title-page of Scott’s “Goetz,” where the translator’s name is given as William Scott.  But it led to a slightly acrimonious correspondence between Sir Walter and the Norwich reviewer.[38]

The tide of German romance had begun to ebb before the close of the century.  It rose again a few years later, and left perhaps more lasting tokens this second time; but the ripple-marks of its first invasion are still discernible in English poetry and prose.  Southey was clearly in error when he wrote to Taylor, September 5, 1798:  “Coleridge’s ballad, ‘The Ancient Mariner’ is, I think, the clumsiest attempt at German sublimity I ever saw."[39] The “Mariner” is not in the least German, and when he wrote it, Coleridge had not been in Germany and did not know the language.  He had read “Die Rauber,” to be sure, some years before in Tytler’s translation.  He was at Cambridge at the time, and one night in winter, on leaving the room of a college friend, carelessly picked up and took away with him a copy of the tragedy, the very name of which he had never heard before.  “A winter midnight, the wind high and ‘The Robbers’ for the first time.  The readers of Schiller will conceive what I felt.”  He recorded, in the sonnet “To Schiller” (written December, 1794, or January, 1795), the terrific impression left upon his imagination by