not only does not
require but positively rejects them.

For here, while Scott had lost little, if anything, of the formal graces
of the _Lay_, he had improved immensely in grip and force. Clare may be
a bread-and-butter heroine, and Wilton a milk-and-water lover, but the
designs of Marmion against both give a real story-interest, which is
quite absent from the _Lay_. The figure of Constance is really tragic,
not melodramatic merely, and makes one regret that Scott, in his prose
novels, did not repeat and vary her. All the accessories, both in
incident and figure, are good, and it is almost superfluous to praise
the last canto. It extorted admiration from the partisan rancour and the
literary prudishness of Jeffrey; it made the disturbed dowagers of the
_Critical Review_, who thought, with Rymer, that 'a hero ought to be
virtuous,' mingle applause with their fie-fies; it has been the delight
of every reader, not a milksop, or a faddist, or a poetical
man-of-one-idea, ever since. The last canto of _Marmion_ and the last
few 'Aventiuren' of the _Nibelungen Lied_ are perhaps the only things in
all poetry where a set continuous battle (not a series of duels as in
Homer) is related with unerring success; and the steady _crescendo_ of
the whole, considering its length and intensity, is really miraculous.
Nay, even without this astonishing finale, the poem that contained the
opening sketch of Norham, the voyage from Whitby to Holy Island, the
final speech of Constance, and the famous passage of her knell, the
Host's Tale, the pictures of Crichton and the Blackford Hill view, the
'air and fire' of the 'Lochinvar' song, the phantom summons from the
Cross of Edinburgh, and the parting of Douglas and Marmion, could spare
half of these and still remain one of the best of its kind, while every
passage so spared would be enough to distinguish any poem in which it
occurred.

The considerable change in the metre of _Marmion_ as compared with the
_Lay_ is worth noticing. Here, as there, the 'introductions' are, for
the most part, if not throughout, in continuous octosyllabic couplets.
But, in the text, the couplet plays also a much larger part than it
does in the _Lay_, and where it is dropped the substitute is not usually
the light and extremely varied medley of the earlier poem, so much as a
sort of irregular (and sometimes almost regular) stanza arrangement,
sets of (usually three) octosyllables being interspersed with sixes,
rhymi