to the
rhymeless, shortened Pindaric of Sayers and Southey, as to anything but
an eccentric 'sport' of poetry. What Scott had to offer was practically
new, or at least novel. It is universally known--and Scott, who was only
too careless of his own claims, and the very last of men to steal or
conceal those of others, made no secret of it--that the suggestion of
the _Lay_ in metre came from a private recitation or reading of
Coleridge's _Christabel_, written in the year of Scott's marriage, but
not published till twenty years later, and more than ten after the
appearance of the _Lay_. Coleridge seems to have regarded Scott's
priority with an irritability less suitable to his philosophic than to
his poetical character.[16] But he had, in the first place, only himself,
if anybody, to blame; in the second, Scott more than made the loan his
own property by the variations executed on its motive; and in the third,
Coleridge's original right was far less than he seems to have honestly
thought, and than most people have guilelessly assumed since.

For the iambic dimeter, freely altered by the licences of equivalence,
anacrusis, and catalexis, though not recently practised in English when
_Christabel_ and the _Lay_ set the example, is an inevitable result of
the clash between accented, alliterative, asyllabic rhythm and
quantitative, exactly syllabic metre, which accompanied the
transformation of Anglo-Saxon into English. We have distinct approaches
to it in the thirteenth century _Genesis_; it attains considerable
development in Spenser's _The Oak and the Brere_; anybody can see that
the latter part of Milton's _Comus_ was written under the breath of its
spirit. But it had not hitherto been applied on any great scale, and the
delusions under which the eighteenth century laboured as to the syllabic
restrictions of English poetry had made it almost impossible that it
should be. At the same time, that century, by its lighter practice on
the one hand in the octosyllable, on the other in the four-footed
anapaestic, was making the way easier for those who dared a little: and
Coleridge first, then Scott, did the rest.

We have seen that in some of his early ballad work Scott had a little
overdone the licence of equivalence, but this had probably been one of
the formal points on which, as we know, the advice of Lewis, no poet but
a remarkably good metrist, had been of use to him. And he acquitted
himself now in a manner which, if it ne