take to revive exploded superstition. The gods are effective in Homer, because both the age of which he wrote and that in which he wrote believed devoutly in the terrors of their thunder. But the guardian angels of England, Ireland, and Scotland—St. George, St. Patrick, and St. Andrew—could never have been more than ingenious human inventions. Scott did as much with superstition as any modern writer could venture. He gave the omen, the prophecy, and the gramarye, without which the picture he drew would have been incomplete. And what a picture he has drawn! how true, how breathing! It is England exactly as England was—full of tumult and of adventure, but with a rude sense of justice and a dawn of information destined to produce such vast after-growth of knowledge and prosperity. No writer has the art of conveying so much by a slight intimation. Sir Hugh the Heron Bold urges his invitation on the English Baron, that he "may breathe his war-horse well," for—
"The Scots can rein a mettled steed,
And love to couch a spear.
St. George! a stirring life they lead
That have such neighbours near."
Wat Tinlyn gives in three lines an equally vivid notion of the consequences of such "pleasant pastime :"—
"They burn'd my little lonely tower;
The foul fiend rive their souls therefore!
It had not been burn'd a year or more."
Not to have your house burned over your head for a twelvemonth seems an unwonted piece of domestic quiet. The metre, too, of these noble poems was admirably chosen. It is entirely English—it belongs to the period it illustrates—and the battle alone in "Marmion" may show what was its spirit and strength. It must, indeed, have rung like a silver trumpet amid the silken inanities of the Hayley and Seward school. It is quite odd now to read the sort of deprecating praise with which these poems were received by the established critical authorities. The expression of popular applause is too strong to be resisted, but while Mr. Scott's talents are universally admitted, he is constantly admonished to choose some loftier theme, as if any theme could have been better suited to a great national poet than one belonging to the history of that country whose youth is renewed in his stirring lines.
Never did any one age produce two minds so essentially opposed as those of Byron and Scott. Byron idealised and expressed that bitter spirit of discontent which has at the present moment taken a more material and tangible form. He is the incarnation of November. From time immemorial it has been an Englishman's privilege to grumble, and Byron gave picturesque language to the universal feeling. He embodied in his heroes what is peculiarly our insular character—its shyness, its sensitiveness, and its tendency to morbid despondency. Scott, on the contrary, took the more commercial and fighting side of the character; he embodied its enterprise and resistance. The difference is strongly shown in the delineation of their two most marked heroes—"Lara" and "Marmion." Both are men brave, unscrupulous, and accustomed
