in spite of detraction, Walter Scott remains one of the foremost British lyrists.  In Mr. Palgrave’s “Treasury” he is represented by a larger number of selections than either Milton, Byron, Burns, Campbell, Keats, or Herrick; making an easy fourth to Wordsworth, Shakspere, and Shelley.  And in marked contrast with Shelley especially, it is observable of Scott’s contributions to this anthology that they are not the utterance of the poet’s personal emotion; they are coronachs, pibrochs, gathering songs, narrative ballads, and the like—­objective, dramatic lyrics touched always with the light of history or legend.

The step from ballad to ballad-epic is an easy one, and it was by a natural evolution that the one passed into the other in Scott’s hands.  “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” (1805) was begun as a ballad on the local tradition of Gilpin Horner and at the request of the Countess of Dalkeith, who told Scott the story.  But his imagination was so full that the poem soon overflowed its limits and expanded into a romance illustrative of the ancient manners of the Border.  The pranks of the goblin page run in and out through the web of the tale, a slender and somewhat inconsequential thread of diablerie.  Byron had his laugh at it in “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers";[30] and in a footnote on the passage, he adds:  “Never was any plan so incongruous and absurd as the groundwork of this production.”  The criticism was not altogether undeserved; for the “Lay” is a typical example of romantic, as distinguished from classic, art both in its strength and in its weakness; brilliant in passages, faulty in architechtonic, and uneven in execution.  Its supernatural machinery—­Byron said that it had more “gramarye” than grammar—­is not impressive, if due exception be made of the opening of Michael Scott’s tomb in Canto Second.

When the “Minstrelsy” was published, it was remarked that it “contained the elements of a hundred historical romances.”  It was from such elements that Scott built up the structure of his poem about the nucleus which the Countess of Dalkeith had given him.  He was less concerned, as he acknowledged, to tell a coherent story than to paint a picture of the scenery and the old warlike life of the Border; that tableau large de la vie which the French romanticists afterwards professed to be the aim of their novels and dramas.  The feud of the Scotts and Carrs furnished him with a historic background; with this he enwove a love story of the Romeo and Juliet pattern.  He rebuilt Melrose Abbey, and showed it by moonlight; set Lords Dacre and Howard marching on a Warden-raid, and roused the border clans to meet them; threw out dramatic character sketches of “stark moss-riding Scots” like Wat Tinlinn and William of Deloraine; and finally enclosed the whole in a cadre most happily invented, the venerable, pathetic figure of the old minstrel who tells the tale to the Duchess of Monmouth at Newark Castle.