ure of his life and character
while writing _Marmion_, which adds greatly to its attraction as a
poem. You have a picture at once not only of the scenery, but of the
mind in which that scenery is mirrored, and are brought back frankly,
at fit intervals, from the one to the other, in the mode best adapted
to help you to appreciate the relation of the poet to the poem. At
least if Milton's various interruptions of a much more ambitious
theme, to muse upon his own qualifications or disqualifications for
the task he had attempted, be not artistic mistakes--and I never heard
of any one who thought them so--I cannot see any reason why Scott's
periodic recurrence to his own personal history should be artistic
mistakes either. If Scott's reverie was less lofty than Milton's, so
also was his story. It seems to me as fitting to describe the relation
between the poet and his theme in the one case as in the other. What
can be more truly a part of _Marmion_, as a poem, though not as a
story, than that introduction to the first canto in which Scott
expresses his passionate sympathy with the high national feeling of
the moment, in his tribute to Pitt and Fox, and then reproaches
himself for attempting so great a subject and returns to what he calls
his "rude legend," the very essence of which was, however, a
passionate appeal to the spirit of national independence? What can be
more germane to the poem than the delineation of the strength the poet
had derived from musing in the bare and rugged solitudes of St. Mary's
Lake, in the introduction to the second canto? Or than the striking
autobiographical study of his own infancy which I have before
extracted from the introduction to the third? It seems to me that
_Marmion_ without these introductions would be like the hills which
border Yarrow, without the stream and lake in which they are
reflected.

Never at all events in any later poem was Scott's touch as a mere
painter so terse and strong. What a picture of a Scotch winter is
given in these few lines:--

"The sheep before the pinching heaven
To shelter'd dale and down are driven,
Where yet some faded herbage pines,
And yet a watery sunbeam shines:
In meek despondency they eye
The wither'd sward and wintry sky,
And from beneath their summer hill
Stray sadly by Glenkinnon's rill."

Again, if Scott is ever Homeric (which I cannot think he often is),
in spite of Sir Francis Doyle's able criticism,--(