lly understood, nor the progress of
poetry in the nineteenth, without some study of the plague of ghosts and
skeletons which has left its mark on _The Ancient Mariner_, from which
Goethe and Scott did not escape, which imposed on Shelley in his youth,
to which Byron yielded his tribute of _The Vampire_. A tempting subject
for expatiation, especially when one remembers--and who that has once
read it can forget?--the most glorious passage in the _Memoirs_ of
Alexandre Dumas describing his first conversation with the unknown
gentleman who afterwards turned out to be Charles Nodier, in the theatre
of the Porte Saint-Martin where the play was the _Vampire_: from which
theatre Charles Nodier was expelled for hissing the _Vampire_, himself
being part-author of the marvellous drama. I hope it is not impertinent
in a stranger to express his unbounded gratitude for that delightful and
most humorous dialogue, in which the history of the Elzevir Press
(starting from _Le Pastissier francois_) and the tragedy of the rotifer
are so adroitly interwoven with the theatrical scene of Fingal's Cave
and its unusual visitors, the whole adventure ending in the happiest
laughter over the expulsion of the dramatist. I may not have any right
to say so, but I throw myself on the mercy of my hearers: I remember
nothing in any chronicle so mercurial or jovial in its high spirits as
this story of the first encounter and the beginning of friendship
between Charles Nodier and Alexandre Dumas.

The Vampire of Staffa may seem rather far from the range of Scott's
imagination; but his contributions to Lewis's _Tales of Wonder_ show the
risk that he ran, while the White Lady of Avenel in _The Monastery_
proves that even in his best years he was exposed to the hazards of
conventional magic.

Lockhart has given the history of _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, how
the story developed and took shape. It is not so much an example of
Scott's mode of writing poetry as an explanation of his whole literary
life. _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_ was his first original piece of any
length and his first great popular success. And, as Lockhart has
sufficiently shown, it was impossible for Scott to get to it except
through the years of exploration and editing, the collection of the
Border ballads, the study of the old metrical romance of _Sir Tristrem_.
The story of the Goblin Page was at first reckoned enough simply for one
of the additions to the Border Minstrelsy on the