eat modesty, when he said, "I am
sensible that if there is anything good about my poetry ... it is a
hurried frankness of composition which pleases soldiers, sailors, and
young people of bold and active dispositions." The poet Campbell, who
was so fascinated by Scott's ballad of "Cadyow Castle" that he used to
repeat it aloud on the North Bridge of Edinburgh until "the whole
fraternity of coachmen knew him by tongue as he passed," characterizes
the predominant charm of Scott's poetry as lying in a "strong, pithy
eloquence," which is perhaps only another name for "hurried frankness of
composition." If this is not the highest quality to which poetry can
attain, it is a very admirable one; and it will be a sad day for the
English-speaking race when there shall not be found persons of every age
and walk of life, to take the same delights in these stirring poems as
their author loved to think was taken by "soldiers, sailors, and young
people of bold and active dispositions."

III. THE LADY OF THE LAKE

1. HISTORICAL SETTING

_The Lady of the Lake_ deals with a distinct epoch in the life of King
James V of Scotland, and has lying back of it a considerable amount of
historical fact, an understanding of which will help in the appreciation
of the poem. During his minority the King was under the tutelage of
Archibald Douglas, sixth Earl of Angus, who had married the King's
mother. The young monarch chafed for a long time under this authority,
but the Douglases were so powerful that he was unable to shake it off,
in spite of several desperate attempts on the part of his sympathizers
to rescue him. In 1528 the King, then sixteen years of age, escaped from
his own castle of Falkland to Stirling Castle. The governor of Stirling,
an enemy of the Douglas family, received him joyfully. There soon
gathered about his standard a sufficient number of powerful peers to
enable him to depose the Earl of Angus from the regency and to banish
him and all his family to England. The Douglas who figures in the poem
is an imaginary uncle of the banished regent, and himself under the ban,
compelled to hide away in the shelter provided for him by Roderick Dhu
on the lonely island in Loch Katrine. He is represented as having been
loved and trusted by King James during the boyhood of the latter, before
the enmity sprang up between the house of Angus and the throne. This
enmity, to quote from the _History of the House of Douglas_, published
at