in the following year.  But already Scott had uneasy misgivings that the style would not bear unlimited repetition.  Even before Byron burst upon the world with the two first cantos of Childe Harold, and drew on him the eyes of all readers of poetry, Scott had made the unwelcome discovery that his own matter and manner was imitable, and that others were borrowing it.  Many could now “grow the flower” (or something like it), for “all had got the seed.”  It was this persuasion that set him thinking whether he might not change his topics and his metre, and still retain his public.  To this end he threw up a few tiny ballons d’essai—­experiments in the manner of some of his popular contemporaries, and printed them in the columns of the Edinburgh Annual Register.  One of these was a grim story of village crime called The Poacher, and written in avowed imitation of Crabbe.  Scott was earnest in assuring Lockhart that he had written in no spirit of travesty, but only to test whether he would be likely to succeed in narrative verse of the same pattern.  He had adopted Crabbe’s metre, and as far as he could compass it, his spirit also.  The result is noteworthy, and shows once again how a really original imagination cannot pour itself into another’s mould.  A few lines may suffice, in evidence.  The couplet about the vicar’s sermons makes one sure that for the moment Scott was good-humouredly copying one foible at least of his original:—­

  “Approach and through the unlatticed window peep. 
  Nay, shrink not back, the inmate is asleep;
  Sunk ’mid yon sordid blankets, till the sun
  Stoop to the west, the plunderer’s toils are done. 
  Loaded and primed, and prompt for desperate hand,
  Rifle and fowling-piece beside him stand,
  While round the hut are in disorder laid
  The tools and booty of his lawless trade;
  For force or fraud, resistance or escape
  The crow, the saw, the bludgeon, and the crape;
  His pilfered powder in yon nook he hoards,
  And the filched lead the church’s roof affords—­
  (Hence shall the rector’s congregation fret,
  That while his sermon’s dry, his walls are wet.)
  The fish-spear barbed, the sweeping net are there,
  Dog-hides, and pheasant plumes, and skins of hare,
  Cordage for toils, and wiring for the snare. 
  Bartered for game from chase or warren won,
  Yon cask holds moonlight,[5] seen when moon was none;
  And late-snatched spoils lie stowed in hutch apart,
  To wait the associate higgler’s evening cart.”

Happily for Scott’s fame, and for the world’s delight, he did not long pursue the unprofitable task of copying other men. Rokeby appeared, was coldly received, and then Scott turned his thoughts to fiction in prose, came upon his long-lost fragment of Waverley and the need of conciliating the poetic taste of the day was at an end for ever.  But his affection for Crabbe never waned.  In his earlier novels there was no contemporary poet he more often quoted as headings for his chapters—­and it was Crabbe’s Borough to which he listened with unfailing delight twenty years later, in the last sad hours of his decay.