s, where personal
heroism counts for little. These may be, I suppose, the main reasons
why great wars produce so little heroic verse: it may be questioned
whether even our civil wars of the seventeenth century inspired any
genuine poetry of this sort. And when in the eighteenth century the
clang of arms had completely died away at home, the battle pieces were
done after an artificial literary fashion, by writers who were content
to describe vaguely the charging of hosts, the thunder of cannon, the
groans of the wounded, and other such mechanical generalities.

If any one could have revived the true heroic style, it would have
been done by Walter Scott, with his delight in the border minstrelsy,
and his martial ardour; but the romantic spirit was too strong upon
him. He had laid hold of the right tradition, could give picturesque
scenes and characters of a bygone time, and _Bonnie Dundee_ is a
ringing ballad; yet his style in the longer metrical tales is
distinctly romantic and conventional. If he had not been writing for
readers to whom the rough riders of the Border in the sixteenth
century were totally strange and unreal beings, he could never have
said that they

'Carved at the meal with gloves of steel,
And drank the red wine through the helmet barred.'

An unsophisticated audience would have laughed outright at such a
comical performance. And we can see how Scott, as a poet of the
battlefield, had become possessed with the idea that the grand style
must be a lofty strain, something magnificently unusual, by his two
poems upon Waterloo, which are fine failures; though we may admit the
impossibility of making a heroic poem out of a battle that has just
been minutely described in newspapers. On the other hand, his prose
novels afford us a remarkable example of the two styles contrasted.
When he wrote of the middle ages, as in _Ivanhoe_, _The Talisman_, and
others, he was a pure romancer; whereas in his Tales of Scotland in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in the _Legend of Montrose_,
_Old Mortality_, _The Bride of Lammermoor_, there are two or three
rapid sketches of sharp fighting which are true and spirited, full of
vivacity and character. On this ground he trod firmly, knowing the
country, the times, and the people of Scotland: while the petty
skirmishes at Drumclog or Bothwell Brig were easier to manage
artistically than a great battle. Poetry, indeed, like painting, can
do nothing on a vast s