These well-known translations, or rather imitations, the first published
under the title of _William and Helen_, which it retains, the other as
_The Chase_, which was subsequently altered to the better and more
literal rendering, show unmistakably the result of the study of ballads,
both in the printed forms and as orally delivered. Some crudities of
rhyme and expression are said to have been corrected at the instance of
one of Scott's (at this time rather numerous) Egerias, the beautiful
wife of his kinsman, Scott of Harden, a young lady partly of German
extraction, but of the best English breeding. Slight books of the kind,
even translations, made a great deal more mark sometimes in those days
than they would in these; but there were a great many translations of
_Lenore_ about, and except by Scott's friends, little notice was taken
of the volume. There were some excuses for the neglect, the best perhaps
being that English criticism at the time was at nearly as low an ebb as
English poetry. A really acute critic could hardly have mistaken the
difference between Scott's verse and the fustian or tinsel of the Della
Cruscans, the frigid rhetoric of Darwin, or the drivel of Hayley. Only
Southey had as yet written ballad verses with equal vigour and facility;
and, I think, he had not yet published any of them. It is Scott who
tells us that he borrowed

'Tramp, tramp, along the land they rode,
Splash, splash, along the sea,'

from Taylor of Norwich; but Taylor himself had the good taste to see how
much it was improved by the completion--

'The scourge is red, the spur drops blood,
_The fashing pebbles flee_'--

which last line, indeed, Coleridge himself hardly bettered in the not
yet written _Ancient Mariner_, the _ne plus ultra_ of the style. It must
be mainly a question of individual taste whether the sixes and eights of
the _Lenore_ version or the continued eights of the _Huntsman_ please
most. But any one who knows what the present state of British poetry was
in October 1796 will be more than indifferently well satisfied with
either.

It was never Scott's way to be cast down at the failure or the neglect
of any of his work; nor does he seem to have been ever actuated by the
more masculine but perhaps equally childish determination to 'do it
again' and 'shame the fools.' It seems quite on the cards that he might
have calmly acquiesced in want of notoriety, and have continued a mere
literary lawy