history, which, before his day,
were covered by the clouds of ignorance, and which his breath was to sweep
away.

Such are his claims as the first of the new romantic poets. We might here
leave him, to consider his prose works in another connection; but it seems
juster to his fame to continue and complete a sketch of his life, because
all its parts are of connected interest. The poems were a grand proem to
the novels.

While he was achieving fame by his poetry, and reaping golden rewards as
well as golden opinions, he was also ambitious to establish a family name
and estate. To this end, he bought a hundred acres of land on the banks of
the Tweed, near Melrose Abbey, and added to these from time to time by the
purchase of adjoining properties. Here he built a great mansion, which
became famous as Abbotsford: he called it one of his air-castles reduced
to solid stone and mortar. Here he played the part of a feudal proprietor,
and did the honors for Scotland to distinguished men from all quarters:
his hospitality was generous and unbounded.

THE WAVERLEY NOVELS.--As early as 1805, while producing his beautiful
poems, he had tried his hand upon a story in prose, based upon the
stirring events in 1745, resulting in the fatal battle of Culloden, which
gave a death-blow to the cause of the Stuarts, and to their attempts to
regain the crown. Dissatisfied with the effort, and considering it at that
time less promising than poetry, he had thrown the manuscript aside in a
desk with some old fishing-tackle. There it remained undisturbed for eight
years. With the decline of his poetic powers, he returned to the former
notion of writing historical fiction; and so, exhuming his manuscript, he
modified and finished it, and presented it anonymously to the world in
1814. He had at first proposed the title of _Waverley, or 'Tis Fifty Years
Since_, which was afterwards altered to '_Tis Sixty Years Since_. This,
the first of his splendid series of fictions, which has given a name to
the whole series, is by no means the best; but it was good and novel
enough to strike a chord in the popular heart at once. Its delineations of
personal characters already known to history were masterly; its historical
pictures were in a new and striking style of art. There were men yet
living to whom he could appeal--men who had _been out_ in the '45, who had
seen Charles Edward and many of the originals of the author's heroes and
heroines. In his researc