His love scenes are at once chaste, impassioned, and tender; and his harp songs and battle lyrics are unrivalled in harmony.  And, besides these merits, he gives us everywhere glimpses of history, which, before his day, were covered by the clouds of ignorance, and which his breath was to sweep away.

Such are his claims as the first of the new romantic poets.  We might here leave him, to consider his prose works in another connection; but it seems juster to his fame to continue and complete a sketch of his life, because all its parts are of connected interest.  The poems were a grand proem to the novels.

While he was achieving fame by his poetry, and reaping golden rewards as well as golden opinions, he was also ambitious to establish a family name and estate.  To this end, he bought a hundred acres of land on the banks of the Tweed, near Melrose Abbey, and added to these from time to time by the purchase of adjoining properties.  Here he built a great mansion, which became famous as Abbotsford:  he called it one of his air-castles reduced to solid stone and mortar.  Here he played the part of a feudal proprietor, and did the honors for Scotland to distinguished men from all quarters:  his hospitality was generous and unbounded.

THE WAVERLEY NOVELS.—­As early as 1805, while producing his beautiful poems, he had tried his hand upon a story in prose, based upon the stirring events in 1745, resulting in the fatal battle of Culloden, which gave a death-blow to the cause of the Stuarts, and to their attempts to regain the crown.  Dissatisfied with the effort, and considering it at that time less promising than poetry, he had thrown the manuscript aside in a desk with some old fishing-tackle.  There it remained undisturbed for eight years.  With the decline of his poetic powers, he returned to the former notion of writing historical fiction; and so, exhuming his manuscript, he modified and finished it, and presented it anonymously to the world in 1814.  He had at first proposed the title of Waverley, or ’Tis Fifty Years Since, which was afterwards altered to ’Tis Sixty Years Since.  This, the first of his splendid series of fictions, which has given a name to the whole series, is by no means the best; but it was good and novel enough to strike a chord in the popular heart at once.  Its delineations of personal characters already known to history were masterly; its historical pictures were in a new and striking style of art.  There were men yet living to whom he could appeal—­men who had been out in the ’45, who had seen Charles Edward and many of the originals of the author’s heroes and heroines.  In his researches and wanderings, he had imbibed the very spirit of Scottish life and history; and the Waverley novels are among the most striking literary types and expounders of history.