As when encountering in some mountain glen,
Eurus and Notus shake the forest deep,
Of oak, or ash, or slender cornel-tree,
Whose tapering branches are together thrown
With fearful din and crash of broken boughs;
So, mixed confusedly, Greeks and Trojans fought,
No thought of flight by either entertained.
Thick o'er Cebriones the javelins flew,

And feathered arrows bounding from the string,
And ponderous stones that on the bucklers rang,
As round the dead they fought; amid the dust
That eddying rose, his art forgotten all,
A mighty warrior, mightily he lay."

Those only who have read the original know how much it loses both in vividness of edge and in swinging power, when dulled down into the blank verse of the translation. To the English reader, Lord Derby's verse sounds flat and tame compared with the rapid and ringing octosyllabics of Scott, when he is at his best, as in his description of Flodden. And yet Scott's best eightsyllable lines may not compare with

"The long resounding march and energy divine"

of the Homeric hexameters.

It will be said, I am aware, that in Scott's romantic poems, though heroic subjects are handled, yet "neither the subject nor the form rises to the true dignity of the epic." That they are regular epics, as these are defined by the canons of the critics, no one would contend. But that they abound in the epic element, as no other English poems abound, cannot be gainsaid. In subject, neither Marmion nor The Lord of the Isles falls below the epic pitch, unless it be that the whole history of Scotland is inadequate to furnish material for an epic. And as to form, if the large admixture of romantic incident and treatment be held to mar the epic dignity,

this does not hinder that these poems rise to the true epic height, in such passages as the battle of Floden, and the priest's benediction of the Bruce.

It would be a pleasant task to go through the other poems of Scott, laying one's finger on the scenes and passages in which the epic fire most clearly breaks out; and showing how epically conceived many of his heroes are, with what entire sympathy he thew himself into the heroic character. But this task cannot be attempted now. Suffice it that in The Lady of the Lake, though its tone is throughout more romantic than epic, yet there are true gleams of heroic fire, as in the Gathering; still stronger in the combat between Roderick and Fitz James, and again in that battle-stave which the bard sings to the dying Roderick, in which occur these two lines, breathing the very spirit of Homer himself:

"'T were worth ten years of peaceful life,
One glance at their array!'.

In his last long poem Scott essayed a subject more fitted for a national epic than any other which the history of either Scotland or England supplies the wan derings of Bruce and his ultimate victory at Bannockburn. Delightful as The Lord of the Isles in many of its parts is, I cannot agree with Lockhart's estimate of it, when he says, that "the Battle of Bannockburn, now that we can compare these works from something like the same point of view, does not appear to me in the slightest particular inferior to the Flodden of Mar mion." This will hardly be the verdict of posterity. It was not to be expected that the same poet 'should describe in full two such battles with equal vigor and effect. There is a fire and a swing about the former, a heroic spirit in the short octosyllabics describing Flod

den, which we look for in vain in the careful and almost too historic accuracy of the earlier battle. Flodden, the less likely of the two themes to kindle a Scottish poet's enthusiasm, in order of poetic composition, came first. Scott was then in the prime of his poetic ardor. When he touched Bruce and Bannockburn that noon was past; he was tired of the trammels of metre, and was hastening on to his period of prose creation. Had he, on the contrary, begun with Bruce, and given him the full force of his earlier inspiration, he would no doubt have made out of the adventures of the great national hero the great epic poem of Scotland, which The Lord of the Isles can hardly claim to be. There is no subject in all history more fitted for epic treatment; it requires no fiction to adorn it. The character of Bruce, the events of his wanderings, as described by Barbour, in the mountain wilds, through which the outlawed king passed, where tradition still preserves the track of his footsteps, these in themselves are enough. They need no added fiction, but only the true singer to come in the prime of inspiration, and render them as they deserve. Whatever similarity may exist between Homer and Scott must have come from intrinsic likeness of genius, not from conscious imitation. For Scott is said to have been so innocent of any knowledge of Greek, that the light of Homer could only have reached him, dimly reflected, from the horn lanterns of Pope's or Cowper's translations. The similarity is not confined only to the spirit by which the two poets are animated. It comes out not less strikingly in small details of mannner the constant epithets, for instance, by which Scott describes his heroes, "the doughty Douglas," "the bold Buccleuch," "William of Deloraine, good at need." It

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is seen, too, in the plain yet picturesque epithets with which Scott hits off the distinctive character of places. Who that has sailed among the Hebrides but must at ; once feel the graphic force of such expressions as "lonely Colonsay," "the sandy Coll," "Ronin's mountains dark"?

Space has not allowed me to touch, much less ex haust, the many phases of Scott's poems, in which the heroic element appears. The Homeric spirit which breathes through his novels I have not even alluded to. But I would suggest it as a pleasant and instructive task to any one who cares for such things, to read once again the Waverley novels, noting, as he passes, the places where the Homeric vein most distinctly crops out. In such a survey we should take the Homeric vein in its widest range, as it appears in the romantic adventures and beautiful home-pictures of the Odyssey, not less than in the battle scenes of the Iliad.

Scott's earliest novel supplies much that recalls Odyssey and Iliad alike. In the Charge of Preston-pans, "Down with your plaids,' cries Fergus MacIvor, throwing his own. 'We'll win silks for our tartans, before the sun is above the sea.' . . . The vapors rose like a curtain, and showed the two armies in the act of closing." Again, in a story so near our own day as that of The Antiquary, with what grand relief comes in the old background of the heroic time, behind the more modern characters and incidents, when the aged croon Elspeth is overheard in her cottage chanting her oldworld snatches about the Earl of Glenallan and the red Harlaw, where Celt and Saxon fought out their controversy, from morn till evening, a whole summer's day!

...

"Now haud your tongue, baith wife and carle,

And listen, great and sma',

And I will sing of Glenallan's Earl,

That fought on the red Harlaw.

"The coronach 's cried on Bennachie,

And doun the Don and a'

And Hieland and Lawland may mornfu' be

For the sair field of Harlaw!"

Or I might point to another of the more modern novels, to Redgauntlet, and Wandering Willie's Tale. Every one should remember yet perhaps some forget auld Steenie's visit to the nether world, and the sight he got of that set of ghastly revellers sitting round the table there. 66 'My gude sire kend mony that had long before gane to their place, for often had he piped to the most part in the hall of Redgauntlet. There was And there was Claverhouse, as beautiful as when he lived, with his long, dark, curled locks, streaming down over his laced buff-coat, and his left hand always on his right spule-blade, to hide the wound that the silver bullet had made. He sat apart from them all, and looked at them with a melancholy, haughty countenance; while the rest hallooed, and sung, and laughed, that the room rang." Turn to the novel, and read the whole scene. There is nothing in the Odyssean Tartarus to equal it. If Scott is not Homeric here, he is something more. There is in that weird ghastly vision a touch of sublime horror, to match which we must go beyond Homer, to Dante, or to Shakespeare.

Moralists before now have asked, What has Scott done by all this singing about battles, and knights, and chivalry, but merely amuse his fellow-men? Has he in any way really elevated and improved them? It might be enough to answer this question by saying,