is far better than any ghostly touch in it; so, too, every one will remember how spirited a rider is the white Lady of Avenel, in The Monastery, and how vigorously she takes fords,—­as vigorously as the sheriff himself, who was very fond of fords.  On the whole, Scott was too sunny and healthy-minded for a ghost-seer; and the skull and cross-bones with which he ornamented his “den” in his father’s house, did not succeed in tempting him into the world of twilight and cobwebs wherein he made his first literary excursion.  His William and Helen, the name he gave to his translation of Buerger’s Lenore, made in 1795, was effective, after all, more for its rapid movement, than for the weirdness of its effects.

If, however, it was the raw preternaturalism of such ballads as Buerger’s which first led Scott to test his own powers, his genius soon turned to more appropriate and natural subjects.  Ever since his earliest college days he had been collecting, in those excursions of his into Liddesdale and elsewhere, materials for a book on The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border; and the publication of this work, in January, 1802 (in two volumes at first), was his first great literary success.  The whole edition of eight hundred copies was sold within the year, while the skill and care which Scott had devoted to the historical illustration of the ballads, and the force and spirit of his own new ballads, written in imitation of the old, gained him at once a very high literary name.  And the name was well deserved.  The Border Minstrelsy was more commensurate in range with the genius of Scott, than even the romantic poems by which it was soon followed, and which were received with such universal and almost unparalleled delight.  For Scott’s Border Minstrelsy gives more than a glimpse of all his many great powers—­his historical industry and knowledge, his masculine humour, his delight in restoring the vision of the “old, simple, violent world” of rugged activity and excitement, as well as that power to kindle men’s hearts, as by a trumpet-call, which was the chief secret of the charm of his own greatest poems.  It is much easier to discern the great novelist of subsequent years in the Border Minstrelsy than even in The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion, and The Lady of the Lake taken together.  From those romantic poems you would never guess that Scott entered more eagerly and heartily into the common incidents and common cares of every-day human life than into the most romantic fortunes; from them you would never know how completely he had mastered the leading features of quite different periods of our history; from them you would never infer that you had before you one of the best plodders, as well as one of the most enthusiastic dreamers, in British literature.  But all this might have been gathered from the various introductions and notes to the Border Minstrelsy, which are full of skilful illustrations,