ing its bright thread through the tissue of his savage
nature, is drawn with an equally convincing hand. Against his gloomy
figure the boyish magnanimity of Malcolm Graeme, Ellen's brave
faithfulness, made human by a surface play of coquetry, and the quiet
nobility of the exiled Douglas, stand out in varied relief. Judged in
connection with the more conventional character types of _Marmion_, and
with the draped automatons of the _Lay_, the characters of _The Lady of
the Lake_ show the gradual growth in Scott of that dramatic imagination
which was later to fill the vast scene of his prose romances with
unforgettable figures.

But the most significant advance which this poem shows over earlier work
is in the greater genuineness of the poetic effect. In the description,
for example, of the approach of Roderick Dhu's boats to the island,
there is a singular depth of race feeling. There is borne in upon us, as
we read, the realization of a wild and peculiar civilization; we get a
breath of poetry keen and strange, like the shrilling of the bag-pipes
across the water. Again, in the speeding of the fiery cross there is a
primitive depth of poetry which carries with it a sense of "old,
unhappy, far-off things"; it appeals to latent memories in us, which
have been handed down from an ancestral past. There is nothing in either
_The Lay of the Last Minstrel_ or _Marmion_ to compare for natural
dramatic force with the situation in _The Lady of the Lake_ when
Roderick Dhu whistles for his clansmen to appear, and the astonished
Fitz-James sees the lonely mountain side suddenly bristle with tartans
and spears; and the fight which follows at the ford is a real fight, in
a sense not at all to be applied to the tournaments and other
conventional encounters of the earlier poems. Even where Scott still
clung to supernatural devices to help along his story, he handles them
with much greater subtlety than he had done in his earlier efforts. The
dropping of Douglas's sword from its scabbard when his disguised enemy
enters the room, arouses the imagination without burdening it. It has
the same imaginative advantage over such an episode as that in the
_Lay_, where the ghost of the wizard comes to bear off the goblin page,
as suggestion always has over explicit statement. This gain in subtlety
of treatment will be made still more apparent by comparing with any
supernatural episode of the _Lay_, the account in _The Lady of the Lake_
of the uneart