Before that tide of flight and chase,
    How shall it keep its rooted place,
      The spearmen’s twilight wood? 
    Down, down, cried Mar, ’your lances down
      Bear back both friend and foe!’
    Like reeds before the tempest’s frown,
    That serried grove of lances brown
      At once lay levell’d low;
    And, closely shouldering side to side,
    The bristling ranks the onset bide,—­
    ’We’ll quell the savage mountaineer,
      As their Tinchel cows the game! 
    They came as fleet as forest deer,
      We’ll drive them back as tame.’”

But admirable in its stern and deep excitement as that is, the battle of Flodden in Marmion passes it in vigour, and constitutes perhaps the most perfect description of war by one who was—­almost—­both poet and warrior, which the English language contains.

And Marmion registers the high-water mark of Scott’s poetical power, not only in relation to the painting of war, but in relation to the painting of nature.  Critics from the beginning onwards have complained of the six introductory epistles, as breaking the unity of the story.  But I cannot see that the remark has weight.  No poem is written for those who read it as they do a novel—­merely to follow the interest of the story; or if any poem be written for such readers, it deserves to die.  On such a principle—­which treats a poem as a mere novel and nothing else,—­you might object to Homer that he interrupts the battle so often to dwell on the origin of the heroes who are waging it; or to Byron that he deserts Childe Harold to meditate on the rapture of solitude.  To my mind the ease and frankness of these confessions of the author’s recollections give a picture of his life and character while writing Marmion, which adds greatly to its attraction as a poem.  You have a picture at once not only of the scenery, but of the mind in which that scenery is mirrored, and are brought back frankly, at fit intervals, from the one to the other, in the mode best adapted to help you to appreciate the relation of the poet to the poem.  At least if Milton’s various interruptions of a much more ambitious theme, to muse upon his own qualifications or disqualifications for the task he had attempted, be not artistic mistakes—­and I never heard of any one who thought them so—­I cannot see any reason why Scott’s periodic recurrence to his own personal history should be artistic mistakes either.  If Scott’s reverie was less lofty than Milton’s, so also was his story.  It seems to me as fitting to describe the relation between the poet and his theme in the one case as in the other.  What can be more truly a part of Marmion, as a poem, though not as a story, than that introduction to the first canto in which Scott expresses his passionate sympathy with the high national feeling of the moment, in his tribute to Pitt and Fox, and then reproaches himself for attempting so great a subject and returns