ontrast with Lewis' penny dreadful,
than the martial ring of the verse and the manly vigor of the style in
Scott's part of the book. This is how Lewis writes anapaests, _e.g._:

"All shrouded she was in the garb of the tomb,
Her lips they were livid, her face it was wan;
A death the most horrid had rifled her bloom
And each charm of beauty was faded and gone."

And this is how Scott writes them:

"He clenched his set teeth and his gauntleted hand,
He stretched with one buffet that page on the sand. . .
For down came the Templars like Cedron in flood,
And dyed their long lances in Saracen blood."

It is no more possible to take Monk Lewis seriously than to take Horace
Walpole seriously. They are both like children telling ghost-stories in
the dark and trying to make themselves shudder. Lewis was even frivolous
enough to compose paradies on his own ballads. A number of these
_facetiae_--"The Mud King," "Giles Jollup the Grave and Brown Sally
Green," etc.--diversify his "Tales of Wonder."

Scott soon found better work for his hands to do than translating German
ballads and melodramas; but in later years he occasionally went back to
these early sources of romantic inspiration. Thus his poem "The Noble
Moringer" was taken from a "Sammlung Deutscher Volkslieder" published at
Berlin in 1807 by Busching and Von der Hagen. In 1799 he had made a
_rifacimento_ of a melodrama entitles "Der Heilige Vehme" in Veit Weber's
"Sagen der Vorzeit." This he found among his papers thirty years after
(1829) and printed in "The Keepsake," under the title of "The House of
Aspen." Its most telling feature is the description of the Vehm-Gericht
or Secret Tribunal, but it has little importance. In his "Historic
Survey," Taylor said that "Goetz von Berlichingen" was "translated into
English in 1799 at Edinburgh, by Wm. Scott, Advocate; no doubt the same
person who, under the poetical but assumed name of Walter, had since
become the most extensively popular of the British writers"! This
amazing statement is explained by a blunder on the title-page of Scott's
"Goetz," where the translator's name is given as _William_ Scott. But it
led to a slightly acrimonious correspondence between Sir Walter and the
Norwich reviewer.[38]

The tide of German romance had begun to ebb before the close of the
century. It rose again a few years later, and left perhaps more lasting
tokens this second time; but the ri