them, took off their hats to each other, and parted, laughing.  Scott’s is almost the only poetry in the English language that not only runs thus in the head of average men, but heats the head in which it runs by the mere force of its hurried frankness of style, to use Scott’s own terms, or by that of its strong and pithy eloquence, as Campbell phrased it.  And in Cadyow Castle this style is at its culminating point.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 10:  Lockhart’s Life of Scott, ii. 79.]

[Footnote 11:  Lockhart’s Life of Scott, viii. 370.]

CHAPTER V.

SCOTT’S MATURER POEMS.

Scott’s genius flowered late. Cadyow Castle, the first of his poems, I think, that has indisputable genius plainly stamped on its terse and fiery lines, was composed in 1802, when he was already thirty-one years of age.  It was in the same year that he wrote the first canto of his first great romance in verse, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, a poem which did not appear till 1805, when he was thirty-four.  The first canto (not including the framework, of which the aged harper is the principal figure) was written in the lodgings to which he was confined for a fortnight in 1802, by a kick received from a horse on Portobello sands, during a charge of the Volunteer Cavalry in which Scott was cornet.  The poem was originally intended to be included in the Border Minstrelsy, as one of the studies in the antique style, but soon outgrew the limits of such a study both in length and in the freedom of its manner.  Both the poorest and the best parts of The Lay were in a special manner due to Lady Dalkeith (afterwards Duchess of Buccleugh), who suggested it, and in whose honour the poem was written.  It was she who requested Scott to write a poem on the legend of the goblin page, Gilpin Horner, and this Scott attempted,—­and, so far as the goblin himself was concerned, conspicuously failed.  He himself clearly saw that the story of this unmanageable imp was both confused and uninteresting, and that in fact he had to extricate himself from the original groundwork of the tale, as from a regular literary scrape, in the best way he could.  In a letter to Miss Seward, Scott says,—­“At length the story appeared so uncouth that I was fain to put it into the mouth of my old minstrel, lest the nature of it should be misunderstood, and I should be suspected of setting up a new school of poetry, instead of a feeble attempt to imitate the old.  In the process of the romance, the page, intended to be a principal person in the work, contrived (from the baseness of his natural propensities, I suppose) to slink down stairs into the kitchen, and now he must e’en abide there."[12] And I venture to say that no reader of the poem ever has distinctly understood what the goblin page did or did not do, what it was that was “lost” throughout