The poem of The Field of Waterloo was published before the end of
October; the profits of the first edition being the author's
contribution to the fund raised for the relief of the widows and
children of the soldiers slain in the battle. This piece appears to
have disappointed those most disposed to sympathize with the author's
views and feelings. The descent is indeed heavy from his Bannockburn
to his Waterloo: the presence, or all but visible reality of what his
dreams cherished, seems to have overawed his imagination, and tamed it
into a weak pomposity of movement. The burst of pure native enthusiasm
upon the _Scottish_ heroes that fell around the Duke of Wellington's
person bears, however, the broadest marks of the "Mighty Minstrel:"--

"Saw gallant Miller's fading eye
Still bent where Albyn's standards fly,
And Cameron, in the shock of steel,
Die like the offspring of Lochiel," etc.;--

and this is far from being the only redeeming passage. There is one,
indeed, in which he illustrates what he then thought Buonaparte's
poorness of spirit in adversity, {p.077} which always struck me as
preeminently characteristic of Scott's manner of interweaving, both in
prose and verse, the moral energies with analogous natural
description, and combining thought with imagery,--

"Or is thy soul like mountain tide,
That, swelled by winter storm and shower,
Rolls down in turbulence of power,
A torrent fierce and wide;
Reft of these aids, a rill obscure,
Shrinking unnoticed, mean and poor,
Whose channel shows displayed
The wrecks of its impetuous course,
But not one symptom of the force
By which these wrecks were made!"

The poem was the first upon a subject likely to be sufficiently
hackneyed; and, having the advantage of coming out in a small cheap
form--(prudently imitated from Murray's innovation with the tales of
Byron, which was the death-blow to the system of verse in quarto)--it
attained rapidly a measure of circulation above what had been reached
either by Rokeby or The Lord of the Isles.

Meanwhile the revision of Paul's Letters was proceeding; and Scott had
almost immediately on his return to Abbotsford concluded his bargain
for the first edition of a third novel--The Antiquary--to be published
also in the approaching winter. Harold the Dauntless, too, was from
time to time taken up as the amusement of _horae subsecivae_. As for
Scott's out-of-doors occupations of that