line 111.  ’See Introduction to the ‘Minstrelsy,’ vol. iv. p. 59.’—­ Lockhart.

lines 117-20.  The Tweed winds and loiters around Mertoun and its grounds as if fascinated by their attractiveness.  With line. 120 cp. ‘clipped in with the sea,’ I Henry iv, iii.  I. 45.

line 126.  Cp. 2 Henry iv, iii. 2. 228:  ’We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow!’

line 132.  Scott quotes from Congreve’s ’Old Bachelor,’—­’Hannibal was a pretty fellow, sir—­a very pretty fellow in his day,’ which is part of a speech by Noll Bluffe, one of the characters.

line 139.  With ‘Limbo lost,’ cp. the ‘Limbo large and broad’ of ‘Paradise Lost,’ iii. 495.  Limbo is the borders of hell, and also hell itself.

line 143.  ’John Leyden, M. D., who had been of great service to Sir Walter Scott in the preparation of the ‘Border Minstrelsy,’ sailed for India in April, 1803, and died at Java in August, 1811, before completing his 36th year.

“Scenes sung by him who sings no more! 
His brief and bright career is o’er,
And mute his tuneful strains;
Quench’d is his lamp of varied lore,
That loved the light of song to pour;
A distant and a deadly shore
Has LEYDEN’S cold remains.” 
Lord of the Isles, Canto iv.

’See a notice of his life in the Author’s Miscellaneous Prose Works, vol. iv.’—­Lockhart.

line 146.  For the solemn and powerful interview of Hercules and Ulysses, see close of Odyssey xi.  Wraith (Icel. vordhr, guardian) is here used for shade.  In Scottish superstition it signifies the shadow of a person seen before death, as in ‘Guy Mannering,’ chap. x:  ‘she was uncertain if it were the gipsy, or her wraith.’  The most notable use of the word and the superstition in recent poetry is in Rossetti’s ’King’s Tragedy’:—­

     ’And the woman held his eyes with her eyes:—­
        “O King; thou art come at last;
      But thy wraith has haunted the Scottish sea
        To my sight for four years past. 
      “Four years it is since first I met,
       ’Twixt the Duchray and the Dhu,
      A shape whose feet clung close in a shroud,
        And that shape for thine I knew,"’ &c.

line 148.  AEneid, iii. 19.

line 159.  ’This passage is illustrated by “Ceubren yr Ellyll, or the Spirit’s Blasted Tree,” a legendary tale, by the Reverend George Warrington, who says:—­

’"The event, on which the tale is founded, is preserved by tradition in the family of the Vaughans of Hengwyrt; nor is it entirely lost, even among the common people, who still point out this oak to the passenger.  The enmity between the two Welsh chieftains, Howel Sele, and Owen Glendwr, was extreme, and marked by vile treachery in the one, and ferocious cruelty in the other. {3} The story is somewhat changed and softened, as more favourable to the character of the