tion
in Edinburgh, and some in London, the amount of his original
publications was then but small. Indeed, on the austere principles of
those who deny 'originality' to such things as reviews, or as the essays
in the _Minstrelsy_, it must be limited to a mere handful, though of
very pleasant delights, the half-dozen of ballads made up by
'Glenfinlas,' 'The Eve of St. John,' the rather inferior 'Fire King,'
the beautiful 'Cadzow Castle' (not yet mentioned, but containing some of
its author's most charming _topic_ lines), the fragment of 'The Grey
Brother,' and a few minor pieces.

With the _Lay_ he took an entirely different position. The mere bulk of
the poem was considerable; and, putting for the instant entirely out of
question its peculiarities of subject, metre, and general treatment, it
was a daring innovation in point of class. The eighteenth century had,
even under its own laws and conditions, distinctly eschewed long
narrative poems, the unreadable epics of Glover, for instance, belonging
to that class of exception which really does prove the rule. Pope's
_Rape_ had been burlesque, and his _Dunciad_, satire; hardly the ghost
of a narrative had appeared in Thomson and Young; Shenstone, Collins,
Gray, had nothing _de longue haleine_; the entire poetical works of
Goldsmith probably do not exceed in length a canto of the Lay; Cowper
had never attempted narrative; Crabbe was resting on the early laurels
of his brief _Village_, etc., and had not begun his tales. _Thalaba_,
indeed, had been published, and no doubt was not without effect on Scott
himself; but it was not popular, and the author was still under the sway
of the craze against rhyme. To all intents and purposes the poet was
addressing the public, in a work combining the attractions of fiction
with the attractions of verse at considerable length, for the first time
since Dryden had done so in his _Fables_, a hundred and five years
before. And though the mastery of the method might be less, the stories
were original, they were continuous, and they displayed an entirely new
gust and seasoning both of subject and of style.

There can be no doubt at all, for those who put metre in its proper
place, that a very large, perhaps the much larger, part of the appeal of
the _Lay_ was metrical. The public was sick of the couplet--had indeed
been sickened twice over, if the abortive revolt of Gray and Collins be
counted. It did not take, and was quite right in not taking,