d to
hear that Scott's father told him disgustedly that he was better fitted
to be a fiddling peddler, a "gangrel scrape-gut," than a respectable
attorney. As a matter of fact, however, behind the mad pranks and the
occasional excesses there was a very serious purpose in all this
scouring of the country-side. Scott was picking up here and there, from
the old men and women with whom he hobnobbed, antiquarian material of an
invaluable kind, bits of local history, immemorial traditions and
superstitions, and, above all, precious ballads which had been handed
down for generations among the peasantry. These ballads, thus
precariously transmitted, it was Scott's ambition to gather together and
preserve, and he spared no pains or fatigue to come at any scrap of
ballad literature of whose existence he had an inkling. Meanwhile, he
was enriching heart and imagination for the work that was before him. So
that here also, though in the hair-brained and heady way of youth, he
was engaged in his task of preparation.

Scott has told us that it was his reading of _Don Quixote_ which
determined him to be an author, but he was first actually excited to
composition in another way. This was by hearing recited a ballad of the
German poet Buerger, entitled _Lenore_, in which a skeleton lover carries
off his bride to a wedding in the land of death. Mr. Hutton remarks
upon the curiousness of the fact that a piece of "raw supernaturalism"
like this should have appealed so strongly to a mind as healthy and sane
as Scott's. So it was, however. He could not rid himself of the
fascination of the piece until he had translated it, and published it,
together with another translation from the same author. One stanza at
least of this first effort of Scott sounds a note characteristic of his
poetry:

Tramp! tramp! along the land they rode,
Splash! splash! along the sea;
The scourge is red, the spur drops blood,
The flashing pebbles flee.

Here we catch the trumpet-like clang and staccato tramp of verse which
he was soon to use in a way to thrill his generation. This tiny pamphlet
of verse, Scott's earliest publication, appeared in 1796. Soon after, he
met Monk Lewis, then famous as a purveyor to English palates of the
crude horrors which German romanticism had just ceased to revel in.
Lewis was engaged in compiling a book of supernatural stories and poems
under the title of _Tales of Wonder_, and asked Scott to contribute.
Scott wrote for th