ch the French romanticists afterwards professed to be the aim of
their novels and dramas. The feud of the Scotts and Carrs furnished him
with a historic background; with this he enwove a love story of the Romeo
and Juliet pattern. He rebuilt Melrose Abbey, and showed it by
moonlight; set Lords Dacre and Howard marching on a Warden-raid, and
roused the border clans to meet them; threw out dramatic character
sketches of "stark moss-riding Scots" like Wat Tinlinn and William of
Deloraine; and finally enclosed the whole in a _cadre_ most happily
invented, the venerable, pathetic figure of the old minstrel who tells
the tale to the Duchess of Monmouth at Newark Castle.

The love story is perhaps the weakest part of the poem. Henry Cranstoun
and Margaret of Branksome are nothing but lay figures. Scott is always a
little nervous when the lover and the lady are left alone together. The
fair dames in the audience expect a tender scene, but the harper pleads
his age, by way of apology, gets the business over as decently as may be,
and hastens on with comic precipitation to the fighting, which he
thoroughly enjoys.[31]

The "light-horseman stanza" which Scott employed in his longer poems was
caught from the recitation by Sir John Stoddart of a portion of
Coleridge's "Christabel," then still in manuscript. The norm of the
verse was the eight-syllabled riming couplet used in most of the English
metrical romances of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It is a
form of verse which moves more swiftly than blank verse or the heroic
couplet, and is perhaps better suited for romantic poetry.[32] But it is
liable to grow monotonous in a long poem, and Coleridge's unsurpassed
skill as a metrist was exerted to give it freedom, richness, and variety
by the introduction of anapaestic lines and alternate rimes and triplets,
breaking up the couplets into a series of irregular stanzas.

With "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" romanticism came of age and entered
on its career of triumph. One wishes that Collins and Tom Warton might
have lived to hail it as the light, at last, towards which they had
struggled through the cold obstruction of the eighteenth century. One
fancies Dr. Johnson's disgust over this new Scotch monstrosity, which had
every quality that he disliked except blank verse; or Gray's delight in
it, tempered by a critical disapproval of its loose construction and
irregularity. Scott's romances in prose and verse are stil