The love story is perhaps the weakest part of the poem.  Henry Cranstoun and Margaret of Branksome are nothing but lay figures.  Scott is always a little nervous when the lover and the lady are left alone together.  The fair dames in the audience expect a tender scene, but the harper pleads his age, by way of apology, gets the business over as decently as may be, and hastens on with comic precipitation to the fighting, which he thoroughly enjoys.[31]

The “light-horseman stanza” which Scott employed in his longer poems was caught from the recitation by Sir John Stoddart of a portion of Coleridge’s “Christabel,” then still in manuscript.  The norm of the verse was the eight-syllabled riming couplet used in most of the English metrical romances of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.  It is a form of verse which moves more swiftly than blank verse or the heroic couplet, and is perhaps better suited for romantic poetry.[32] But it is liable to grow monotonous in a long poem, and Coleridge’s unsurpassed skill as a metrist was exerted to give it freedom, richness, and variety by the introduction of anapaestic lines and alternate rimes and triplets, breaking up the couplets into a series of irregular stanzas.

With “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” romanticism came of age and entered on its career of triumph.  One wishes that Collins and Tom Warton might have lived to hail it as the light, at last, towards which they had struggled through the cold obstruction of the eighteenth century.  One fancies Dr. Johnson’s disgust over this new Scotch monstrosity, which had every quality that he disliked except blank verse; or Gray’s delight in it, tempered by a critical disapproval of its loose construction and irregularity.  Scott’s romances in prose and verse are still so universally known as to make any review of them here individually an impertinence.  Their impact on contemporary Europe was instantaneous and wide-spread.  There is no record elsewhere in literary history of such success.  Their immense sales, the innumerable editions and translations and imitations of them, are matters of familiar knowledge.  Poem followed poem, and novel, novel in swift and seemingly exhaustless succession, and each was awaited by the public with unabated expectancy.  Here once more was a poet who could tell the world a story that it wanted to hear; a poet

  “Such as it had
  In the ages glad,
      Long ago.”

The Homeric[33] quality which criticism has attributed or denied to these poems is really there.  The difference, the inferiority is obvious of course.  They are not in the grand style; they are epic on a lower plane, ballad-epic, bastard-epic perhaps, but they are epic.  No English verse narrative except Chaucer’s ranks, as a whole, above Scott’s.  Chaucer’s disciple, William Morris, has an equal flow and continuity, and keeps a more even level of style; but his story-telling is languid compared