ays Mr. Irving, "we often walked in
_the Meadows_"--(a large field intersected by formal alleys of old
trees, adjoining George's Square)--"especially in the moonlight
nights; and he seemed never weary of repeating the first stanza--

'The dews of summer night did fall--
The Moon, sweet regent of the sky,
Silvered the walls of Cumnor Hall,
And many an oak that grew thereby.'"

I have thought it worth while to preserve these reminiscences of his
companions at the time, though he has himself stated the circumstance
in his Preface to Kenilworth. "There is a period in youth," he there
says, "when {p.119} the mere power of numbers has a more strong
effect on ear and imagination than in after-life. At this season of
immature taste, the author was greatly delighted with the poems of
Mickle and Langhorne. The first stanza of Cumnor Hall especially had a
peculiar enchantment for his youthful ear--the force of which is not
yet (1829) entirely spent." Thus that favorite elegy, after having
dwelt on his memory and imagination for forty years, suggested the
subject of one of his noblest romances.

It is affirmed by a preceding biographer, on the authority of one of
these brother-apprentices, that about this period Scott showed him a
MS. poem on the Conquest of Granada, in four books, each amounting to
about 400 lines, which, soon after it was finished, he committed to
the flames.[63] As he states in his Essay on the Imitation of Popular
Poetry, that, for ten years previous to 1796, when his first
translation from the German was executed, he had written no verses
"except an occasional sonnet to his mistress's eyebrow," I presume
this Conquest of Granada, the fruit of his study of the Guerras
Civiles, must be assigned to the summer of 1786--or, making allowance
for trivial inaccuracy, to the next year at latest. It was probably
composed in imitation of Mickle's Lusiad:--at all events, we have a
very distinct statement, that he made no attempts in the manner of the
old minstrels, early as his admiration for them had been, until the
period of his acquaintance with Buerger. Thus with him, as with most
others, genius had hazarded many a random effort ere it discovered the
true keynote. Long had

"Amid the strings his fingers stray'd,
And an uncertain warbling made,"

before "the measure wild" was caught, and

"In varying cadence, soft or strong,
He sw