is book three long ballads--"Glenfinlas," "Cadyow
Castle," and "The Gray Brother." Though tainted with the conventional
diction of eighteenth century verse, these ballads are not unimpressive
pieces of work; the second named, especially, shows a kind and degree of
romantic imagination such as his later poetry rather substantiated than
newly revealed.

II

In the following year, 1797, Scott married a Miss Charpentier, daughter
of a French refugee. She was not his first love, that place having been
usurped by a Miss Stuart Belches, for whom Scott had felt perhaps the
only deep passion of his life, and memory of whom was to come to the
surface touchingly in his old age. Miss Charpentier, or Carpenter, as
she was called, with her vivacity and quaint foreign speech "caught his
heart on the rebound"; there can be no doubt that, in spite of a certain
shallowness of character, she made him a good wife, and that his
affection for her deepened steadily to the end. The young couple went to
live at Lasswade, a village near Edinburgh, on the Esk. Scott, in whom
the proprietary instinct was always very strong, took great pride in the
pretty little cottage. He made a dining-table for it with his own hands,
planted saplings in the yard, and drew together two willow-trees at the
gate into a kind of arch, surmounted by a cross made of two sticks.
"After I had constructed this," he says, "mamma (Mrs. Scott) and I both
of us thought it so fine that we turned out to see it by moonlight, and
walked backwards from it to the cottage door, in admiration of our
magnificence and its picturesque effect." It would have been well
indeed for them both if their pleasures of proprietorship could always
have remained so touchingly simple.

Now that he was married, Scott was forced to look a little more sharply
to his fortunes. He applied himself with more determination to the law.
In 1799 he became deputy-sheriff of Selkirkshire, with a salary of three
hundred pounds, which placed him at least beyond the reach of want. He
began to look more and more to literature as a means of supplementing
his income. His ballads in the _Tales of Wonder_ had gained him some
reputation; this he increased in 1802 by the publication, under the
title _Border Minstrelsy_, of the ballads which he had for several years
been collecting, collating, and richly annotating. Meanwhile he was
looking about for a congenial subject upon which to try his hand in a
larger way than