knight in coal-black armour, with a drawn sword in his hand.  All were as still and silent as if hewn out of marble.  At the far end of a gloomy hall, illuminated, like the halls of Eblis, only by torches, there lay, upon an ancient table, a horn and a sword.  A voice bade Dick try his courage, warning him that much depended upon his first choosing either the horn or the sword.  Dick, whose stout heart quailed before the supernatural terrors of the hall, attempted to blow the horn before unsheathing the sword.  At the first feeble blast the warriors and their steeds started to life, the knights fiercely brandishing their weapons and clashing their armour.  Dick made a fruitless attempt to snatch the sword.  After a mysterious voice had pronounced his doom he was hurled out of the hall by a whirlwind of irresistible fury.  He told his story to the shepherds, who found him dying on the cold hill side.

Regarding this legend as “an unhappy foundation for a prose story,” Scott did not complete his fragment, which in style and treatment is not unlike the Gothic experiments of Mrs. Barbauld and Dr. Nathan Drake.  Such a story as that of the magic horn and sword might have been told in the simple words that occur naturally to a shepherd, “warmed to courage over his third tumbler,” like the old peasant to whom Stevenson entrusts the terrible tale of Thrawn Janet, or to Wandering Willie, who declared: 

“I whiles mak a tale serve the turn among the country bodies, and I have some fearsome anes, that mak the auld carlines shake on the settle, and bits o’ bairns skirl on their minnies out frae their beds.”

The personality of the narrator, swayed by the terror of his tale, would have cast the spell that Scott’s carefully framed sentences fail to create.  Another of Scott’s disjecta membra, composed at the end of the eighteenth century, is the opening of a story called The Lord of Ennerdale, in which the family of Ratcliffe settle down before the fire to listen to a story “savouring not a little of the marvellous.”  As Lady Ratcliffe and her daughters

“had heard every groan and lifted every trapdoor in company with the noted heroine of Udolpho, had valorously mounted en croupe behind the horseman of Prague through all his seven translators, had followed the footsteps of Moor through the forests of Bohemia,”

and were even suspected of an acquaintance with Lewis’s Monk, Scott was setting himself no easy task when he undertook to thrill these seasoned adventurers.  After this prologue, which leads one to expect a banquet of horrors, only a very brief fragment of the story is forthcoming.  Though he gently derides Lady Ratcliffe’s literary tastes, Scott, too, was an admirer of Mrs. Radcliffe’s novels, and had been so entranced by Burger’s Lenore that he attempted an English version.[111] It was after hearing Taylor’s translation of this ballad read