’What will you do, good greybeard? break a lance,
And run a tilt at death within a chair?’

lines 288-309.  The Genius of Chivalry is to be resuscitated from the deep slumber under which baneful spells have long effectually held him.  The appropriateness of this is apparent when the true meaning of Chivalry is considered.  Scott opens his ‘Essay on Chivalry’ thus:—­’The primitive sense of this well-known word, derived from the French Chevalier, signifies merely cavalry, or a body of soldiers serving on horseback; and it has been used in that general acceptation by the best of our poets, ancient and modern, from Milton to Thomas Campbell.’  See Par.  Lost, i. 307, and Battle of Hohenlinden.

line 294.  To spur forward his horse on an expedition of adventures, like Spenser’s Red Cross Knight.  For the accoutrements and the duties of a knight see Scott’s ‘Essay on Chivalry’ (Miscellaneous Works, vol. vi.).  Cp.  ‘Faery Queene,’ Book I, and (especially for the personified abstractions from line 300 onwards) Montgomerie’s allegory, ‘The Cherrie and the Slae.’

line 312.  Ytene’s oaks.  ’The New Forest in Hampshire, anciently so called.’—­Scott.  Gundimore, the residence of W. S. Rose, was in this neighbourhood, and in an unpublished piece entitled ‘Gundimore,’ Rose thus alludes to a visit of Scott’s:—­

     ’Here Walter Scott has woo’d the northern muse;
      Here he with me has joy’d to walk or cruise;
      And hence has prick’d through Yten’s holt, where we
      Have called to mind how under greenwood tree,
      Pierced by the partner of his “woodland craft,”
      King Rufus fell by Tyrrell’s random shaft.’

line 314.  ’The “History of Bevis of Hampton” is abridged by my friend Mr. George Ellis, with that liveliness which extracts amusement even out of the most rude and unpromising of our old tales of chivalry.  Ascapart, a most important personage in the romance, is thus described in an extract:—­

“This geaunt was mighty and strong,
And full thirty foot was long. 
He was bristled like a sow;
A foot he had between each brow;
His lips were great, and hung aside;
His eyen were hollow, his mouth was wide;
Lothly he was to look on than,
And liker a devil than a man. 
His staff was a young oak,
Hard and heavy was his stroke.” 

                      Specimens of Metrical Romances, vol. ii. p. 136.

’I am happy to say, that the memory of Sir Bevis is still fragrant in his town of Southampton; the gate of which is sentinelled by the effigies of that doughty knight errant and his gigantic associate.’- -Scott.

Canto first. The Introduction is written on a basis of regular four-beat couplets, each line being technically an iambic tetrameter; lines 96, 205, and 283 are Alexandrines, or iambic hexameters, each serving to give emphasis and resonance (like the ninth of the Spenserian stanza) to the passage which it closes.  Intensity of expression is given by the triplet which closes the passage ending with line 125.  The metrical basis of the movement in the Canto is likewise iambic tetrameter, but the trimeter or three-beat line is freely introduced, and the poet allows himself great scope in his arrangement.