APPENDIX: ESSAY ON IMITATIONS OF THE
ANCIENT BALLAD (1830)
[Note: The “Essay” originally appeared as
prefatory material to the fourth volume of Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.
It comprises the second of an overall kind of biographia literaria written by Scott, preceded by
the “Introductory Remarks on Popular Poetry,” prefacing the first volume of the
Minstrelsy, and followed by the “Introduction” to The Lay of the Last
Minstrel (both also appearing in 1830). The “Essay” provides material
of special interest to An Apology for Tales of Terror because it records
Scott’s early fascination with the German ballad and his relationship with
Lewis, including an “Appendix” with letters from Lewis
recording his criticism and call for revisions of Scott’s earliest ballads.
Although written long after his disavowal of his “German-mad” phase, Scott’s
account presents a well-balanced rendering of his interest in German
literature, which he believed could furnish “a formidable auxiliary to renewing
the spirit of our own.” Although written long after the decline of Lewis’s
reputation and while acknowledging the controversies attending The Monk and
Tales of Wonder, Scott’s “Essay” also provides a largely sympathetic
portrait of the poet he calls his “Mentor,” claiming that “few persons have
exhibited more mastery of rhyme, or greater command over the melody of
verse.” The “Essay” also supplies valuable information on the rising
interest in “imitations of the ancient ballad” and the various modalities of
imitating and adapting such poetry.
The text is taken from T. F. Henderson’s 1902 edition of the Minstrelsy.
Scott's notes to the text are prefaced by an (S); those supplied by J.G.
Lockhart (Scott’s biographer), by an (L); those supplied by
ESSAY ON IMITATIONS OF
THE ANCIENT BALLAD[1]
The invention of printing necessarily
occasioned the downfall of the Order of Minstrels, already reduced to contempt
by their own bad habits, by the disrepute attached to their profession, and by
the laws calculated to repress their licence.
When the Metrical Romances were very many of them in the hands of every one,
the occupation of those who made their living by reciting them was in some
degree abolished, and the minstrels either disappeared altogether, or sunk into
mere musicians, whose utmost acquaintance with poetry was being able to sing a
ballad. Perhaps old Anthony, who acquired, from the song which he
accounted his masterpiece, the name of Anthony Now Now,
was one of the last of this class in the capital; nor does the tenor of his
poetry evince whether it was his own composition, or that of some other.[2]
But the taste for popular poetry did not decay with the class of men by whom it
had been for some generations practised and
preserved. Not only did the simple old ballads retain their ground,
though circulated by the new art of printing, instead of being preserved by
recitation; but in the Garlands,[3]
and similar collections for general sale, the authors aimed at a more
ornamental and regular style of poetry than had been attempted by the old
minstrels, whose composition, if not extemporaneous, was seldom committed to
writing, and was not, therefore, susceptible of accurate revision. This
was the more necessary, as even the popular poetry was now feeling the effects
arising from the advance of knowledge, and the revival of the study of the
learned languages, with all the elegance and refinement which it induced.
In short, the general progress of the country led to an improvement in the
department of popular poetry, tending both to soften and melodise
the language employed, and to ornament the diction beyond that of the rude
minstrels, to whom such topics of composition had been originally
abandoned. The monotony of the ancient recitals was, for the same causes,
altered and improved upon. The eternal descriptions of battles, and of
love dilemmas, which, to satiety, filled the old romances with trivial
repetition, were retrenched. If any one wishes to compare the two eras of
lyrical poetry, a few verses taken from one of the latest minstrel ballads, and
one of the earliest that were written for the press, will afford him, in some
degree, the power of doing so. The rude lines from Anthony Now Now, which we have just quoted, may, for example, be
compared, as Ritson[4] requests, with the ornamented
commencement of the ballad of ‘Fair Rosamond’:
‘When as King Henry ruled this land
The second of the name,
Besides his queen he dearly loved
A fair and stately dame.
Most peerless was her beauty found,
Her favour, and her face,
A sweeter creature in the world
Did never king embrace.
Her crispèd locks, like threads of gold,
Appeared to each man’s sight;
Her sparkling eyes, like orient pearls,
Did cast a heavenly light.
The blood within her crystal cheeks
Did such a color drive,
As if the lily and the rose
For mastery did strive.’
It may be rash to affirm, that those who lived by singing this more refined
poetry, were a class of men different from the ancient minstrels; but it
appears that both the name of the professors, and the character of the minstrel
poetry, had sunk in reputation.[5]
The facility of versification, and of poetical diction, is decidedly in favour of the moderns, as might reasonably be expected from
the improved taste, and enlarged knowledge, of an age which abounded to such a
degree in poetry, and of a character so imaginative as was the Elizabethan
era. The poetry addressed to the populace, and enjoyed by them alone, was
animated by the spirit that was breathed around. We may cite
Shakespeare’s unquestionable and decisive evidence in this respect. In Twelfth
Night he describes a popular ballad, with a beauty and precision which no
one but himself could have affixed to its character; and the whole constitutes
the strongest appeal in favour of that species of
poetry which is written to suit the taste of the public in general, and is most
naturally preserved by oral tradition. But the remarkable part of the
circumstance is, that when the song is actually sung by Festé
the clown, it differs in almost all particulars from what we might have been
justified in considering as attributes of a popular ballad of that early
period. It is simple, doubtless, both in structure and phraseology, but
is rather a love-song than a minstrel ballad—a love-song, also, which, though
its imaginative figures of speech are of a very simple and intelligible
character, may nevertheless be compared to anything rather than the boldness of
the preceding age, and resembles nothing less than the ordinary minstrel
ballad. The original, though so well known, may be here quoted, for the
purpose of showing, what was, in Shakespeare’s time, regarded as the poetry of
‘the old age.’ Almost every one has the passage by heart, yet I must
quote it, because there seems a marked difference between the species of poem
which is described, and that which is sung:
‘Mark it Cæsario; it is old and plain
:
The spinsters and the knitters in the sun,
And the free maids, that weave their thread with bones,
Do use to chant it; it is silly sooth,
And dallies with the innocence of love,
Like the old age.’
The song, thus beautifully prefaced, is as follows:
‘Come away, come away, death,
And in sad cypress let me be laid,
Fly away, fly away, breath;
I am slain by a fair cruel maid.
My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,
O, prepare it!
My part of death, no one so true
Did share it.
Not a flower, not a flower sweet,
On my black coffin let there be strown;
Not a friend, not a friend greet
My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown:
A thousand, thousand sighs to save,
Lay me, O where
Sad true lover never find my grave
To weep there!’
On comparing this love-elegy, or whatever
it may be entitled, with the ordinary, and especially the earlier popular
poetry, I cannot help thinking that a great difference will be observed in the
structure of the verse, the character of the sentiments, the ornaments and
refinement of the language. Neither, indeed, as might be expected, from
the progress of human affairs, was the change in the popular style of poetry
achieved without some disadvantages, which counterbalanced, in a certain
degree, the superior art and exercise of fancy which had been introduced of
late times.
The expressions of Sir Philip Sidney, an unquestionable judge of poetry,
flourishing in Elizabeth’s golden reign, and drawing around him, like a magnet,
the most distinguished poets of the age, amongst whom we need only name Shakespeare
and Spenser, still show something to regret when he compared the highly wrought
and richly ornamented poetry of his own time with the ruder but more energetic
diction of ‘Chevy Chase.’[6]
His words, often quoted, cannot yet be dispensed with on the present
occasion. They are a chapter in the history of ancient poetry.
‘Certainly,’ says the brave knight, ‘I must confess my own barbarousness;
I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas, that I found not my heart more
moved than with a trumpet. And yet it is sung by some blind crowder, with no rougher voice than rude style, which being
so evil apparelled in the dust and cobwebs of that
uncivil age, what would it work, trimmed in the gorgeous eloquence of Pindar ?’[7]
If we inquire more particularly what were the peculiar charms by which the old
minstrel ballad produced an effect like a trumpet-sound upon the bosom of a
real son of chivalry, we may not be wrong in ascribing it to the extreme
simplicity with which the narrative moves forward, neglecting all the more
minute ornaments of speech and diction, to the grand object of enforcing on the
hearer a striking and affecting catastrophe. The author seems too serious
in his wish to affect the audience, to allow himself to be drawn aside by
anything which can, either by its tenor, or the manner in which it is spoken,
have the perverse effect of distracting attention from the catastrophe.
Such grand and serious beauties, however, occurred but rarely to the old
minstrels; and, in order to find them, it became
necessary to struggle through long passages of monotony, languor, and
inanity. Unfortunately it also happened, that those who, like Sidney,
could ascertain, feel, and do full justice to the beauties of the heroic
ballad, were few, compared to the numbers who could be sensible of the trite verbiage
of a bald passage, or the ludicrous effect of an absurd rhyme. In
In
On the whole, however, the ancient Heroic ballad, as it was called, seemed to
be fast declining among the more enlightened and literary part of both
countries; and if retained by the lower classes in
Subjects the most interesting were abandoned to the poorest rhymers, and one would have
thought that, as in an ass-race, the prize had been destined to the slowest of
those who competed for the prize. The melancholy fate of Miss Ray,[12] who fell by the hands of a frantic
lover, could only inspire the Grub Street muse with such verses as these—that
is, if I remember them correctly:
‘A
And her he dearly loved;
By whom six children had, we hear;
This story fatal proved.
A clergyman, O wicked one,
In
No time to cry upon her God,
It’s hoped He’s not forgot her.’
If it be true, as in other cases, that when things are at the worst, they must
mend, it was certainly time to expect an amelioration
in the department in which such doggerel passed current.
Accordingly, previous to this time, a new species of poetry seems to have
arisen, which in some cases endeavoured to pass
itself as the production of genuine antiquity and in others, honestly avowed an
attempt to emulate the merits and avoid the errors with which the old ballad
was encumbered; and in the effort to accomplish this, a species of composition
was discovered, which is capable of being subjected to peculiar rules of
criticism, and of exhibiting excellences of its own.
In writing for the use of the general reader, rather than the poetical
antiquary, I shall be readily excused from entering into any inquiry respecting
the authors who first showed the way in this peculiar department of modern
poetry, which I may term the imitation of the old ballad, especially that of
the latter or Elizabethan era. One of the oldest, according to my
recollection, which pretends to engraft modern refinement upon ancient
simplicity, is extremely beautiful, both from the words and the simple and
affecting melody to which they are usually sung. The title is ‘Lord Henry
and Fair Catherine.’ It begins thus:
‘In ancient days, in
Lord Henry well was known ;
No knight in all the land more famed,
Or more deserved renown.
His thoughts were all on honour bent,
He ne’er would stoop to love:
No lady in the land had power
His frozen heart to move.’[13]
Early in the
eighteenth century, this peculiar species of composition became popular.
We find Tickell, the friend of Addison, who produced
the beautiful ballad ‘Of
Before, however, treating of the professed imitators of Ancient Ballad Poetry,
I ought to say a word upon those who have written their imitations with the
preconceived purpose of passing them for ancient.
There is no small degree of cant in the violent invectives with which imposters
of this nature have been assailed. In fact, the case of each is special,
and ought to be separately considered, according to its own
circumstances. If a young, perhaps a female,[15] author chooses to circulate a beautiful
poem—we will suppose that of Hardyknute—under the
disguise of antiquity, the public is surely more enriched by the contribution
than injured by the deception.[16]
It is hardly possible, indeed, without the power of political genius, and
acquaintance with ancient language and manners possessed by very few, to
succeed in deceiving those who have made this branch of literature their
study. The very desire to unite modern refinement with the verve
of the ancient minstrels, will itself betray the masquerade. A minute
acquaintance with ancient customs, and with ancient history, is also demanded,
to sustain a part which, as it must rest on deception, cannot be altogether an honourable one.
Two of the most distinguished authors of this class have, in this manner, been
detected; being deficient in the knowledge requisite to support their genius in
the disguise they meditated. Hardyknute, for
instance, already mentioned, is irreconcilable with all chronology, and a chief
with a Norwegian name is strangely introduced as the first of the nobles
brought to resist a Norse invasion, at the battle of Largs:
the ‘needlework so rare,’ introduced by the fair authoress, must have been
certainly long posterior to the reign of Alexander III. In Chatterton’s
ballad of ‘Sir Charles Baudwin,’ we find an anxious
attempt to represent the composition as ancient, and some entries in the public
accounts of Bristol were appealed to in corroboration. But neither was
this ingenious, but most unhappy young man, with all his powers of poetry, and
with the antiquarian knowledge which he had collected with indiscriminating but
astonishing research, able to impose on that part of the public qualified to
judge of the compositions, which it had occurred to him to pass off as those of
a monk of the fourteenth century. It was in vain that he in each word
doubled the consonants, like the sentinels of an endangered army. The art
used to disguise and misspell the words only overdid what was intended, and
afforded sure evidence that the poems published as antiques had been, in fact,
tampered with by a modern artist, as the newly forged medals of modern days
stand convicted of imposture from the very touches of the file, by which there
is an attempt to imitate the cracks and fissures produced by the hammer upon
the original.[17]
I have only met, in my researches into those matters, with one poem, which, if it
had been produced as ancient, could not have been detected on internal
evidence. It is the ‘War song upon the Victory at Brunnanburg,
translated from the Anglo-Saxon into Anglo-Norman,’ by the Right Honourable John Hookham Frere. See Ellis’s Specimens of Ancient English
Poetry, vol. i. p. 32.[18] The accomplished editor tells us,
that this very singular poem was intended as an imitation of the style and
language of the fourteenth century, and was written during the controversy
occasioned by the poems attributed to Rowley.[19] Mr. Ellis adds, ‘the reader will
probably hear with some surprise, that this singular instance of critical
ingenuity was the composition of an
The author may be permitted to speak as an artist on this occasion (disowning,
at the same time, all purpose of imposition), as having written, at the request
of the late Mr. Ritson, one or two things of this
kind—among others, a continuation of the Romance of Thomas of Ercildoune, the only one which chances to be preserved, and
which the reader will find in a subsequent volume.[20] And he thinks himself entitled to
state, that a modern poet engaged in such a task, is much in the situation of
an architect of the present day, who, if acquainted with his profession, finds
no difficulty in copying the external forms of a Gothic castle or abbey; but
when it is completed, can hardly, by any artificial tints or cement, supply the
spots, weather-stains, and hues of different kinds, with which time alone had
invested the venerable fabric which he desires to imitate.
Leaving this branch of the subject, in which the difficulty of passing off what
is modern for what is ancient cannot be a matter of regret, we may bestow with
advantage some brief consideration on the fair trade of manufacturing modern
antiques; not for the purpose of passing them as contraband goods on the
skilful antiquary, but in order to obtain the credit due to authors as
successful imitators of the ancient simplicity, while their system admits of a
considerable infusion of modern refinement. Two classes of imitation may
be referred to as belonging to this species of composition. When they
approach each other, there may be some difficulty in assigning to individual
poems their peculiar character, but in general, the difference is distinctly
marked. The distinction lies betwixt the authors of ballads or legendary
poems, who have attempted to imitate the language, the manners, and the
sentiments of the ancient poems which were their prototypes; and those, on the
contrary, who, without endeavouring to do so, have
struck out a particular path for themselves, which cannot with strict propriety
be termed either ancient or modern.
In the actual imitation of the ancient ballad, Dr. Percy, whose researches made
him well acquainted with that department of poetry, was peculiarly
successful. The ‘Hermit of Warkworth,’ the
‘Child of Elle,’ and other minstrel tales of his composition, must always be
remembered with fondness by those who have perused them in that period of life
when the feelings are strong, and the taste for poetry, especially of this
simple nature, is keen and poignant. This learned and amiable prelate was
also remarkable for his power of restoring the ancient ballad, by throwing in
touches of poetry, so adapted to its tone and tenor, as to assimilate with its
original structure, and impress every one who considered the subject as being
coeval with the rest of the piece. It must be owned that such freedoms,
when assumed by a professed antiquary, addressing himself to antiquaries, and
for the sake of illustrating literary antiquities, are subject to great and
licentious abuse; and herein the severity of Ritson
was to a certain extent justified.[21]
But when the licence is avowed, and practised without the intention to deceive, it cannot be
objected to but by scrupulous pedantry.
The poet, perhaps, most capable, by verses, lines, even single words, to
relieve and heighten the character of ancient poetry, was the Scottish bard
Robert Burns. We are not here speaking of the avowed lyrical poems of his
own composition, which he communicated to Mr. George Thomson,[22] but of the manner in which he recomposed
and repaired the old songs and fragments, for the collection of Johnson and
others,[23]
when, if his memory supplied the theme, or general subject of the song, such as
it existed in Scottish lore, his genius contributed that part which was to give
life and immortality to the whole. If this praise should be thought
extravagant, the reader may compare his splendid lyric, ‘My Heart’s in the
Besides Percy, Burns, and others, we must not omit to mention Mr. Finlay, whose
beautiful song,
‘There came a knight from the field of the slain,’[25]
is so happily descriptive of antique manners;
or Mickle,[26]
whose accurate and interesting imitations of the ancient ballad we have already
mentioned with approbation in the former Essay on Ballad Composition.
These, with others of modern date, at the head of whom we must place Thomas
Moore,[27] have aimed at striking the ancient harp
with the same bold and rough note to which it was awakened by the ancient
minstrels. Southey, Wordsworth, and other distinguished names of the
present century, have, in repeated instances, dignified this branch of
literature; but no one more than Coleridge, in the wild and imaginative tale of
the ‘Ancient Mariner,’ which displays so much beauty with such
eccentricity. We should act most unjustly in this department of Scottish
ballad poetry, not to mention the names of
As we have already hinted, a numerous class of the authors (some of them of the
very first class) who condescended to imitate the simplicity of ancient poetry,
gave themselves no trouble to observe the costume, style, or manner, either of
the old minstrel or ballad-singer, but assumed a structure of a separate and
peculiar kind, which could not be properly termed either ancient or modern,
although made the vehicle of beauties which were common to both. The
discrepancy between the mark which they avowed their purpose of shooting at,
and that at which they really took aim, is best illustrated by a production of
one of the most distinguished of their number. Goldsmith describes the
young family of his Vicar of Wakefield, as amusing themselves with conversing
about poetry. Mr. Burchell observes that the
British poets, who imitated the classics, have especially contributed to
introduce a false taste, by loading their lines with epithets, so as to present
a combination of luxuriant images, without plot or connection—a string of
epithets that improve the sound, without carrying on the sense. But when
an example of popular poetry is produced as free from the fault which the
critic has just censured, it is the well-known and beautiful poem of ‘Edwin and
Agelina!’ which, in felicitous attention to the
language, and in fanciful ornament of imagery, is as unlike to a minstrel
ballad, as a lady assuming the dress of a Shepherdess for a masquerade is
different from the actual Sisly of Salisbury
Plain. Tickell’s beautiful ballad[30] is equally formed upon a pastoral, sentimental,
and ideal model, not, however, less beautifully executed; and the attention of
Addison’s friend has been probably directed to the ballad stanza (for the
stanza is all which is imitated), by the praise bestowed on ‘Chevy Chase’ in
the Spectator.[31]
Upon a later occasion, the subject of Mallet’s fine poem, ‘Edwin and Emma,’
being absolutely rural in itself, and occurring at the hamlet of Bowes, in
Yorkshire, might have seduced the poet from the beau-idéal
which he had pictured to himself, into something more immediately allied to
common life. But Mallet was not a man to neglect what was esteemed
fashionable, and poor Hannah Railton and her lover Wrightson were enveloped in the elegant frippery
appertaining to ‘Edwin and Emma’; for the similes, reflections, and suggestions
of the poet are, in fact, too intrusive and too well said to suffer the reader
to feel the full taste of the tragic tale. The verses are doubtless
beautiful, but, I must own, the simple prose of the Curate’s letter, who gives
the narrative of the tale as it really happened, has to me a tone of serious
veracity more affecting than the ornaments of Mallet’s fiction.[32] The same author’s ballad, ‘William
and Margaret,’ has, in some degree, the same fault. A disembodied spirit
is not a person before whom the living spectator takes leisure to make remarks
of a moral kind; as
‘So will the fairest face appear,
When youth and years are flown,
And such the robe that Kings must wear,
When death has reft
their crown.’
Upon the whole, the ballad, though the best
of Mallet’s writing, is certainly inferior to its original, which I presume to
be the very fine and even terrific old Scottish tale, beginning—
‘There came a ghost to Margaret’s door.’[33]
It may be found in Allan Ramsay’s Tea-Table
Miscellany.[34]
We need only stop to mention another very beautiful piece of this fanciful
kind, by Dr. Cartwright, called ‘Armin and Elvira,’[35] containing some excellent poetry,
expressed with unusual felicity. I have a vision of having met this
accomplished gentleman in my very early youth, and am the less likely to be
mistaken, as he was the first living poet I recollect to have seen.[36] His poem had the distinguished honour to be much admired by our celebrated philosopher, Dugald Stewart, who was wont to quote, with much pathos,
the picture of resignation in the following stanza:
‘And while his eye to heaven he raised,
Its silent waters stole away.’[37]
After enumerating so many persons of undoubted genius, who have cultivated the
Arcadian style of poetry (for to such it may be compared), it would be endless
to enumerate the various Sir Eldreds of the hills and
downs whose stories were woven into legendary tales—which came at length
to be the name assigned to this half-ancient, half-modern style of
composition.
In general, I may observe, that the supposed facility of this species of
composition, the alluring simplicity of which was held sufficient to support
it, afforded great attractions for those whose ambition led them to exercise
their untried talents in verse, but who were desirous to do so with the least
possible expense of thought. The task seems to present, at least to the
inexperienced acolyte of the Muses, the same advantages which an instrument of
sweet sound and small compass offers to those who begin their studies in music.
In either case, however, it frequently happens that the scholar, getting tired
of the palling and monotonous character of the poetry or music which he
produces, becomes desirous to strike a more independent note, even at the risk
of its being a more difficult one.
The same simplicity involves an inconvenience fatal to the continued popularity
of any species of poetry, by exposing it in a peculiar degree to ridicule and
to parody. Dr. Johnson, whose style of poetry was of a very different and more
stately description, could ridicule the ballads of Percy, in such stanzas as
these:
‘The tender infant, meek and mild,
Fell down upon a stone;
The nurse took up the squalling child,
But still the child squall’d on’;
with various slipshod
imitations of the same quality.[38]
It did not require his talents to pursue this vein of raillery, for it was such
as most men could imitate, and all could enjoy. It is, therefore, little
wonderful that this sort of composition should be repeatedly laid aside for
considerable periods of time, and certainly as little so, that it should have
been repeatedly revived, like some forgotten melody, and have again obtained
some degree of popularity, until it sunk once more under satire, as well as
parody, but, above all, the effects of satiety.
During the thirty years that I have paid some attention to literary matters,
the taste for the ancient ballad melody, and for the closer or more distant
imitation of the that strain of poetry, has more than once arisen, and more
than once subsided, in consequence, perhaps, of too unlimited indulgence. That
this has been the case in other countries, we know; for the Spanish poet, when
he found that the beautiful Morisco romances were
excluding all other topics, confers upon them a hearty malediction.[39]
A period when this particular taste for the
popular ballad was in the most extravagant degree of fashion, became the
occasion, unexpectedly, indeed, of my deserting the profession to which I was
educated, and in which I had sufficiently advantageous prospects for a person
of limited ambition. I have, in a former publication,[40] undertaken to mention this circumstance;
and I will endeavor to do so with becoming brevity, and without more egotism
than is positively exacted by the nature of the story.
I may, in the first place, remark that although the assertion has been made,
and that by persons who seemed satisfied with their authority, it is a mistake
to suppose that my situation in life or place in society were materially
altered by such success as I attained in literary attempts. My birth, without
giving the least pretension to distinction, was that of a gentleman, and
connected me with several respectable families and accomplished persons. My
education had been a good one, although I was deprived of its full benefit by
indifferent health, just at the period when I ought to have been most sedulous
in improving it. The young men with whom I was brought up, and lived most
familiarly, were those, who, from opportunities, birth, and talents, might be
expected to make the greatest advances in the career for which we were all
destined; and I have the pleasure still to preserve my youthful intimacy with
no inconsiderable number of them, whom their merit has carried forward to the
highest honours of their profession. Neither was I in
a situation to be embarrassed by the res angusta domi,[41]
which might have otherwise brought painful additional obstructions to a path in
which progress is proverbially slow. I enjoyed a moderate degree of business for
my standing, and the friendship of more than one person of consideration and
influence efficiently disposed to aid my views in life. The private fortune,
also, which I might expect, and finally inherited, from my family, did not,
indeed, amount to affluence, but placed me considerably beyond all apprehension
of want. I mention these particulars merely because they are true. Many better
men than myself have owed their rise from indigence and obscurity to their own
talents, which were, doubtless, much more adequate to the task of raising them
than any which I possess. But although it would be absurd and ungracious in me
to deny that I owe to literature many marks of distinction to which I could not
otherwise have aspired, and particularly that of securing the acquaintance, and
even the friendship, of many remarkable persons of the age, to whom I could not
otherwise have made my way; it would, on the other hand, be ridiculous to
affect gratitude to the public favour, either for my
general position in society, or the means of supporting it with decency,
matters which had been otherwise secured under the usual chances of human
affairs. Thus much I have thought it necessary to say upon a subject, which is,
after all, of very little consequence to any one but myself.
I proceed to detail the circumstances which engaged me in literary pursuits.
During the last ten years of the eighteenth century, the art of poetry was at a remarkably low ebb in
As far back as 1788, a new species of literature began to be introduced into
this country. Germany, long known as a powerful branch of the European
confederacy, was then, for the first time, heard of as the cradle of a style of
poetry and literature, of a kind much more analogous to that of Britain than
either the French, Spanish, or Italian schools, though all three had been at
various times cultivated and imitated among us. The names of Lessing,
Klopstock, Schiller, and other German poets of eminence, were only known in
Unmoved by the scornful neglect of its sovereigns and nobles, and encouraged by
the tide of native genius which flowed in upon the nation, German literature
began to assume a new, interesting, and highly impressive character, to which
it became impossible for strangers to shut their eyes. That it exhibited the
faults of exaggeration and false taste, almost inseparable from the first
attempts at the heroic and at the pathetic, cannot be denied. It was, in a
word, the first crop of a rich soil, which throws out weeds as well as flowers
with a prolific abundance.
It was so late as the 21st day of April 1788 that the literary
persons of Edinburgh, of whom, at that period, I am better qualified to speak
than of those of Britain generally, or especially those of London, were first
made aware of the existence of works of genius in a language cognate with the
English, and possessed of the same manly force of expression. They learned, at
the same time, that the taste which dictated the German compositions was of a
kind as nearly allied to the English as their language. Those who were
accustomed from their youth to admire Milton and Shakespeare, became
acquainted, I may say for the first time, with the existence of a race of poets
who had the same lofty ambition to spurn the flaming boundaries of the
universe,[45]
and investigate the realms of chaos and old night; and of dramatists, who,
disclaiming the pedantry of the unities, sought, at the expense of occasional
improbabilities and extravagances, to present life in its scenes of wildest
contrast, and in all its boundless variety of character, mingling, without
hesitation, livelier with more serious incidents, and exchanging scenes of
tragic distress, as they occur in common life, with those of a comic tendency.
This emancipation from the rules so servilely adhered
to by the French school, and particularly by their dramatic poets, although it
was attended with some disadvantages, especially the risk of extravagance and
bombast, was the means of giving free scope to the genius of Goethe, Schiller,
and others, which, thus relieved from shackles, was not long in soaring to the
highest pitch of poetic sublimity. The late venerable Henry Mackenzie, author
of The Man of Feeling, in an Essay upon the German Theatre,[46] introduced his countrymen to this new
species of national literature, the peculiarities of which he traced with equal
truth and spirit, although they were at that time known to him only through the
imperfect and uncongenial medium of a French translation. Upon the day already
mentioned (21st April 1788), he read to the Royal Society an Essay
on German Literature, which made much noise, and produced a powerful effect.
‘Germany,’ he observed, ‘in her literary aspect, presents herself to
observation in a singular point of view; that of a country arrived at maturity,
along with the neighbouring nations, in the arts and
sciences, in the pleasures and refinements of manners, and yet only in its
infancy with regard to writings of taste and imagination. This last path,
however, from these very circumstances, she pursues with an enthusiasm which no
other situation could perhaps have produced, the enthusiasm which novelty
inspires, and which the servility incident to a more cultivated and critical
state of literature does not restrain.’ At the same time, the accomplished critic
showed himself equally familiar with the classical rules of the French stage,
and failed not to touch upon the acknowledged advantages which these produced,
by the encouragement and regulation of taste, though at the risk of repressing
genius.
But it was not the dramatic literature alone of the Germans which was hitherto unknown to their neighbours—their
fictitious narratives, their ballad poetry, and other branches of their
literature, which are particularly apt to bear the stamp of the extravagant and
the supernatural, began to occupy the attention of the British literati.
In Edinburgh, where the remarkable coincidence between the German language and
that of the Lowland Scottish encouraged young men to approach this newly discovered
spring of literature, a class was formed, of six or seven intimate friends, who
proposed to make themselves acquainted with the German language. They were in
the habit of living much together, and the time they spent in this new study
was felt as a period of great amusement. One source of this diversion was the
laziness of one of their number, the present author, who, averse to the
necessary toil of grammar and its rules, was in the practice of fighting his
way to the knowledge of the German by his acquaintance with the Scottish and
Anglo-Saxon dialects, and, of course, frequently committed blunders which were
not lost on his more accurate and more studious companions. A more general
source of amusement was the despair of the teacher, on finding it impossible to
extract from his Scottish students the degree of sensibility necessary, as he
thought, to enjoy the beauties of the author to whom
he considered it proper first to introduce them. We were desirous to penetrate
at once into the recesses of the Teutonic literature, and therefore were
ambitious of perusing Goethe and Schiller, and others whose fame had been
sounded by Mackenzie. Dr. Willich (a medical
gentleman), who was our teacher, was judiciously disposed to commence our
studies with the more simple diction of Gesner, and prescribed to us The
Death of Abel as the production from which our German tasks were to be
drawn. The pietistic style of this author was ill adapted to attract young
persons of our age and disposition. We could no more sympathize with the
over-strained sentimentality of Adam and his family, than we could have had a
fellow-feeling with the jolly Faun of the same author, who broke his beautiful
jug, and then made a song on it which might have affected all Staffordshire. To
sum up the distresses of Dr. Willich, we, with one consent, voted Abel an insufferable bore, and gave
the preeminence, in point of masculine character, to his brother Cain, or even
to Lucifer himself. When these jests, which arose out of the sickly monotony and
affected ecstasies of the poet, failed to amuse us, we had for our
entertainment the unutterable sounds manufactured by a Frenchman, our
fellow-student, who, with the economical purpose of learning two languages at
once, was endeavoring to acquire German, of which he knew nothing, by means of
English, concerning which he was nearly as ignorant. Heaven only knows the
notes which he uttered, in attempting, with unpractised
organs, to imitate the gutturals of these two intractable languages. At length,
in the midst of much laughing and little study, most of us acquired some
knowledge, more or less extensive, of the German language, and selected for
ourselves, some in the philosophy of Kant, some in the more animated works of
the German dramatists, specimens more to our taste than The Death of Abel.[47]
About this period, or a year or two sooner, the accomplished and excellent Lord
Woodhouselee,[48]
one of the friends of my youth, made a spirited version of The Robbers of
Schiller, which, I believe, was the first published, though an English version
appeared soon afterwards in London—as the metropolis then took the lead in
everything like literary adventure. The enthusiasm
with which this work was received, greatly increased the general taste for
German compositions.
While universal curiosity was thus distinguishing the advancing taste for the
German language and literature, the success of a very young student, in a
juvenile publication, seemed to show that the prevailing taste in that country
might be easily employed as a formidable auxiliary to renewing the spirit of
our own, upon the same system as when medical persons attempt, by the
transfusion of blood, to pass into the veins of an aged and exhausted patient,
the vivacity of the circulation and liveliness of sensation which distinguish a
young subject. The person who first attempted to introduce something like the
German taste into English fictitious dramatic and poetical composition –
although his works, when first published, engaged general attention – is now
comparatively forgotten. I mean Matthew
Gregory Lewis, whose character and literary history are so immediately
connected with the subject of which I am treating, that a few authentic
particulars may be here inserted by one to whom he was well known.
Lewis’s rank in society was determined by his birth, which, at the same time, assured
his fortune. His father was Under-Secretary at War, at that time a very
lucrative appointment, and the young poet was provided with a seat in
Parliament as soon as his age permitted him to fill it. But his mind did not
incline him to politics, or, if it did, they were not of the complexion which
his father, attached to Mr. Pitt’s administration, would have approved. He was,
moreover, indolent, and though possessed of abilities sufficient to conquer any
difficulty which might stand in the way of classical attainments, he preferred
applying his exertions in a path where they were rewarded with more immediate
applause. As he completed his education abroad,[49] he had an opportunity of indulging his
inclination for the extraordinary and supernatural, by wandering through the
whole enchanted
We are easily induced to imitate what we admire, and Lewis early distinguished
himself by a romance in the German taste, called The Monk. In this work,
written in his twentieth year, and founded on the eastern apologue of the Santon Barsisa,[50] the author introduced supernatural
machinery with a courageous consciousness of his own power to manage its
ponderous strength, which commanded the respect of his reader. The Monk
was published in 1795,[51]
and though liable to the objections common to the school to which it belonged,
and to others peculiar to itself, placed its author at once high in the scale
of men of letters. Nor can that be regarded as an ordinary exertion of genius,
to which Charles Fox paid the unusual compliment of crossing the House of
Commons that he might congratulate the young author, whose work obtained high
praise from many other able men of that able time. The party which approved The
Monk was at first superior in the lists, and it was some time before the
anonymous author[52]
of the Pursuits of Literature denounced as puerile and absurd the
supernatural machinery which Lewis had introduced:
‘I bear an English heart,
Unused at ghosts or rattling bones to start.’[53]
Yet the acute and learned critic betrays
some inconsistency in praising the magic of the Italian poets, and
complimenting Mrs. Radcliffe[54]
for her success in supernatural imagery, for which at the same moment he thus
sternly censures her brother-novelist.
A more legitimate topic of condemnation was the indelicacy of particular
passages. The present author will hardly be deemed a willing,
or at least an interested apologist for an offence equally repugnant to decency
and good-breeding. But as Lewis at once, and with a good grace, submitted to
the voice of censure, and expunged the objectionable passages,[55] we cannot help considering the manner in
which the fault was insisted on, after all the amends had been offered of which
the case could admit, as in the last degree ungenerous and uncandid.
The pertinacity with which the passages so much found fault with were dwelt
upon, seemed to warrant a belief that something more was desired than the
correction of the author’s errors; and that, where the apologies of extreme
youth, foreign education, and instant submission, were unable to satisfy the
critics’ fury, they must have been determined to act on the severity of the old
proverb, ‘Confess and be hanged.’ Certain it is, that
other persons, offenders in the same degree, have been permitted to sue out
their pardon without either retraction or palinode.[56]
Another peccadillo of the author of The Monk was his having borrowed
from Musæus, and from the popular tales of the
Germans, the striking and singular adventure of the Bleeding Nun.[57] But the bold and free hand with which he
traced some scenes, as well of natural as of that which arises from
supernatural causes, shows distinctly that the plagiarism could not have been
occasioned by any deficiency of invention on his part, though it might take place
from wantonness or willfulness.
In spite of the objections we have stated, The Monk was so highly
popular, that it seemed to create an epoch in our literature. But the public
were chiefly captivated by the poetry with which Mr. Lewis had interspersed his
prose narrative. It has now passed from recollection among the changes of
literary taste; but many may remember, as well as I do, the effect produced by
the beautiful ballad of ‘Durandarte,’ which had the
good fortune to be adapted to an air of great sweetness and pathos; by the
ghost tale of ‘Alonzo and Imogine’; and by several
other pieces of legendary poetry, which addressed themselves in all the charms
of novelty and of simplicity to a public who had for a long time been unused to
any regale of the kind. In his poetry as well as his prose, Mr. Lewis had been
a successful imitator of the Germans, both in his attachment to the ancient
ballad, and in the tone of superstition which they willingly mingle with it.
New arrangements of the stanza, and a varied construction of verses, were also
adopted, and welcomed as an addition of a new string to the British harp. In
this respect, the stanza in which ‘Alonzo the Brave’ is written,
was greatly admired, and received as an improvement worthy of adoption into
English poetry.[58]
In short, Lewis’s works were admired, and the author became famous, not merely
through his own merit, though that was of no mean quality, but because he had
in some measure taken the public by surprise, by using a style of composition,
which, like national melodies, is so congenial to the general taste, that,
though it palls by being much hackneyed, it has only to be for a short time
forgotten in order to recover its original popularity.
It chanced that, while his fame was at the highest, Mr. Lewis became almost a
yearly visitor to
In early youth I had been an eager student of Ballad Poetry; and the tree is
still in my recollection, beneath which I lay and first entered upon the
enchanting perusal of Percy’s Reliques of
Ancient Poetry, although it has long perished in the general blight which
affected the whole race of Oriental platanus to which
it belonged.[60]
The taste of another person had strongly encouraged my own researches into this
species of legendary lore.[61]
But I had never dreamed of an attempt to imitate what gave me so much pleasure.
I had, indeed, tried the metrical translations which were occasionally
recommended to us at the High School. I got credit for attempting to do what
was enjoined, but very little for the mode in which the task was performed, and
I used to feel not a little mortified when my versions were placed in contrast
with others of admitted merit. At one period of my schoolboy days, I was so far
left to my own desires as to become guilty of Verses on a Thunder-storm, which
were much approved of, until a malevolent critic sprung up, in the shape of an
apothecary’s blue-buskined wife, who affirmed that my most sweet poetry was
stolen from an old magazine. I never forgave the imputation, and even now I
acknowledge some resentment against the poor woman’s memory. She indeed accused
me unjustly, when she said I had stolen my brooms ready made; but as I had,
like most premature poets, copied all the words and ideas of which my verses
consisted, she was so far right. I made one or two faint attempts at verse,
after I had undergone this sort of daw-plucking at
the hands of the apothecary’s wife; but some friend or other always advised me
to put my verses in the fire, and, like Dorax in the
play, I submitted, though ‘with a swelling heart.’[62] In short, excepting the usual tribute to
a mistress’s eyebrow, which is the language of passion rather than poetry, I
had not for ten years indulged the wish to couple so much as love and dove,
when, finding Lewis in possession of so much reputation, and conceiving that,
if I fell behind him in poetical powers, I considerably exceeded him in general
information, I suddenly took it into my head to attempt the style of poetry by
which he had raised himself to fame.
This idea was hurried into execution, in consequence of a temptation which
others, as well as the author, found it difficult to resist. The celebrated
ballad of ‘Lenoré,’ by Bürger,
was about this time introduced into
About the summer of 1793 or 1794, the celebrated Miss Lætitia
Aikin, better known as Mrs. Barbauld,
paid a visit to Edinburgh, and was received by such literary society as the
place then boasted, with the hospitality to which her talents and her worth
entitled her. Among others, she was kindly welcomed by the late excellent and
admired Professor Dugald Stewart, his lady, and
family. It was in their evening society that Miss Aikin
drew from her pocket-book a version of ‘Lenoré,’
executed by William Taylor, Esq., of Norwich,[64] with as much freedom as was consistent
with great spirit and scrupulous fidelity. She read this composition to the
company, who were electrified by the tale. It was the more successful, that Mr.
Taylor had boldly copied the imitative harmony of the German, and described the
spectral journey in language resembling that of the original. Bürger had thus painted the ghostly career:
‘Und hurre, hurre, hop,
hop, hop,
Gings fort in sausendem Galopp,
Dass Ross und Reiter schnoben,
Und Kies und Funken stoben.’
The words were rendered by the kindred
sounds in English:
‘Tramp, tramp, across the land they speede,
Splash, splash, across the sea;
Hurrah, the dead can ride apace!
Dost fear to ride with me?’
When Miss Aikin had finished her recitation, she
replaced in her pocket-book the paper from which she had read it, and enjoyed
the satisfaction of having made a strong impression on the hearers, whose
bosoms thrilled yet the deeper, as the ballad was not to be more closely
introduced to them.
The author was not present upon this occasion, although he had then the
distinguished advantage of being a familiar friend and frequent visitor of Professor
Stewart and his family. But he was absent from town while Miss Aikin was in Edinburgh, and it was not until his return
that he found all his friends in rapture with the intelligence and good sense
of their visitor, but in particular with the wonderful translation from the
German, by means of which she had delighted and astonished them. The
enthusiastic description given of Bürger’s ballad,
and the broken account of the story of which only two lines were recollected,
inspired the author, who had some acquaintance, as has been said, with the
German language, and a strong taste for popular poetry, with a desire to see
the original.
This was not a wish easily gratified; German works were at that time seldom found in
I well recollect that I began my task after supper, and finished it about
daybreak the next morning, by which time the ideas which the task had a
tendency to summon up were rather of an uncomfortable character. As my object
was much more to make a good translation of the poem for those whom I wished to
please, than to acquire any poetical fame for myself, I retained in my
translation the two lines which Mr. Taylor had rendered with equal boldness and
felicity.[66]
My attempt succeeded far beyond my
expectations; and it may readily be believed that I was induced to persevere in
a pursuit which gratified my own vanity, while it seemed to amuse others.
I accomplished a translation of ‘Der Wilde Jäger’—a romantic ballad founded on a superstition
universally current in
The fate of this, my first publication, was by no means flattering. I distributed
so many copies among my friends as, according to the booksellers, materially to
interfere with the sale; and the number of translations which appeared in
England about the same time, including that of Mr. Taylor, to which I had been
so much indebted, and which was published in The Monthly Magazine, were
sufficient to exclude a provincial writer from competition. However
different my success might have been, had I been fortunate to have led the way
in the general scramble for precedence, my efforts sunk unnoticed when launched
at the same time with those of Mr. Taylor (upon whose property I had committed
the kind of piracy already noticed, and who generously forgave me the invasion
of his rights); of my ingenious and amiable friend of many years, William
Robert Spenser; of Mr. Pye, the laureate of the day,
and many others besides. In a word, my adventure, where so many pushed
off to sea, proved a dead loss, and a great part of the edition was condemned
to the service of the trunk-maker. Nay, so complete was the failure of
the unfortunate ballads, that the very existence of them was soon forgotten;
and, in a newspaper, in which I very lately read, to my no small horror, a most
appalling list of my own various publications, I saw this, my first offence,
had escaped the industrious collector, for whose indefatigable research I may
in gratitude wish a better object.[68]
The failure of my first publication did not operate, in any unpleasant degree,
either on my feelings or spirits. I was coldly received by strangers, but
my reputation began rather to increase among my own friends, and, on the whole,
I was more bent to show the world it neglected something worth notice, than to
be affronted by its indifference. Or rather, to speak candidly, I found
pleasure in the literary labour in which I had,
almost by accident, become engaged, and labored, less in the hope of pleasing
others, though certainly without despair of doing so, than in the pursuit of a
new and agreeable amusement to myself. I pursued the German language
keenly, and, though far from being a correct scholar, became a bold and daring
reader, nay, even translator, of various dramatic pieces from that tongue.[69]
The want of books at that time (about 1796) was a great interruption to the
rapidity of my movements; for the young do not know, and perhaps my own
contemporaries may have forgotten, the difficulty with which publications were
then procured from the Continent. The worthy and excellent friend, of
whom I gave a sketch many years afterwards in the person of Jonathan Oldbuck,[70]
procured me Adelung’s Dictionary, through the
mediation of Father Pepper, a monk of the Scotch College of Ratisbon.
Other wants of the same nature were supplied by Mrs. Scott of Harden, whose
kindness in a similar instance I have had already occasion to
acknowledge. Through this lady’s connections on the Continent, I obtained
copies of Bürger, Schiller, Goethe, and other
standard German works; and though the obligation be of a distant date, it still
remains impressed on my memory, after a life spent in a constant interchange of
friendship and kindness with that family, which is, according to Scottish ideas,
the head of my house.
Being thus furnished with the necessary
originals, I began to translate on all sides, certainly without anything like
an accurate knowledge of the language; and although the dramas of Goethe,
Schiller and others, powerfully attracted one whose early attention to the
German had been arrested by Mackenzie’s Dissertation, and the play of The
Robbers, yet the ballad poetry, in which I had made a bold essay, was still
my favourite. I was yet more delighted on finding
that the old English, and especially the Scottish language, were so nearly
similar to the German, not in sound merely, but in the turn of phrase, that
they were capable of being rendered line for line, with very little variation.[71]
By degrees, I acquired sufficient confidence to attempt the imitation of what I
admired. The ballad called ‘Glenfinlas’ was, I
think, the first original poem which I ventured to compose. As it is
supposed to be a translation from the Gaelic, I considered myself as liberated
from imitating the antiquated language and rude rhythm of the Minstrel
ballad. A versification of an Ossianic fragment
came nearer to the idea I had formed of my task; for although controversy may
have arisen concerning the authenticity of the poems, yet I never heard it
disputed, by those whom an accurate knowledge of the Gaelic rendered competent
judges, that in their spirit and diction they nearly resemble fragments of
poetry extant in that language, to the genuine antiquity of which no doubt can
attach. Indeed, the celebrated dispute on that subject is something like
the more bloody though scarce fiercer controversy, about the Popish Plot in
Charles the Second’s time, concerning which Dryden has said:
‘Succeeding times will equal folly call,
Believing nothing, or believing all.’[72]
The Celtic people of Erin and Albyn had, in short, a
style of poetry properly called natural, though MacPherson
was rather an excellent poet than a faithful editor and translator. This
style and fashion of poetry, existing in a different language, was supposed to
give the original of ‘Glenfinlas,’ and the
author was to pass for one who had used his best command of English to do the
Gaelic model justice. In one point, the incidents of the poems were
irreconcilable with the costume of the times in which they were laid. The
ancient Highland chieftains, when they had a mind to ‘hunt the dun deer down,’
did not retreat into solitary bothies, or trust the
success of the chase to their own unassisted exertions, without a single gillie
to help them; they assembled their clan, and all partook of the sport, forming
a ring, or enclosure, called the Tinchell, and
driving the prey towards the most distinguished persons of the hunt. This
course would not have suited me, so Ronald and Moy were cooped up in their
solitary wigwam, like two moorfowl-shooters of the present day.[73]
After ‘Glenfinlas,’ I undertook another ballad,
called ‘The Eve of
Thus was I set up for a poet, like a pedlar who has
got two ballads to begin the world upon, and I hastened to make the round of
all my acquaintances, showing my precious wares, and requesting criticism—a
boon which no author asks in vain. For it may be observed, that, in the
fine arts, those who are in no respect able to produce any specimens
themselves, hold themselves not the less entitled to decide upon the works of
others; and, no doubt, with justice to a certain degree: for the
merits of composition produced for the express purpose of pleasing the world at
large, can only be judged of by the opinion of individuals, and perhaps as in
the case of Molière’s old woman,[76] the less sophisticated the person
consulted so much the better.[77]
But I was ignorant, at the time I speak of, that though the applause of the
many may justly appreciate the general merits of a piece, it is not so safe to
submit such a performance to the more minute criticism of the same individuals
when each, in turn, having seated himself in the censor’s chair, has placed his
mind in a critical attitude, and delivers his opinion sententiously and ex cathedrâ. General applause was in almost every
case freely tendered, but the abatements in the way of proposed alterations and
corrections, were cruelly puzzling. It was in vain the young author,
listening with becoming modesty, and with a natural wish to please, cut and carved,
tinkered and coopered, upon his unfortunate ballad—it was in vain that he
placed, displaced, replaced, and misplaced; every one of his advisers was
displeased with the concessions made to his co-assessors, and the author was
blamed by some one, in almost every case, for having made two holes in
attempting to patch up one.
At last, after thinking seriously on the subject, I wrote out a fair copy (of ‘Glenfinlas,’ I think), and marked all the various
corrections which had been proposed. On the whole, I found that I had
been required to alter every verse, almost every line, and the only stanzas of
the whole ballad which escaped criticism, were two which could neither be
termed good nor bad, speaking of them as poetry, but were of a mere commonplace
character, absolutely necessary for conducting the business of the tale.
This unexpected result, after about a fortnight’s anxiety, led me to adopt a
rule from which I have seldom departed during more than thirty years of
literary life. When a friend, whose judgment I respect, has decided, and
upon good advisement told me, that a manuscript was worth nothing, or at least
possessed no redeeming qualities sufficient to atone for its defects, I have
generally cast it aside; but I am little in the custom of paying attention to
minute criticisms, or of offering such to any friend who may do me the honour to consult me. I am convinced, that, in
general, in removing even errors of a trivial or venial kind, the character of
originality is lost, which, upon the whole, may be that which is most valuable
in the production.
About the time that I shook hands with criticism and reduced my ballads back to
their original form, stripping them without remorse of those ‘lendings’ which I had adopted at the suggestion of
others, an opportunity unexpectedly offered of introducing to the world what
had hitherto been confined to a circle of friends. Lewis had announced a
collection, first intended to bear the title of Tales of Terror, and
afterwards published under that of Tales of Wonder. As this was to
be a collection of tales turning on the preternatural, there were risks in the
plan of which the ingenious editor was not aware. The supernatural,
though appealing to certain powerful emotions very widely and deeply sown
amongst the human race, is, nevertheless, a spring which is peculiarly apt to
lose its elasticity by being too much pressed on, and collection of
ghost-stories is not more likely to be terrible, than a collection of jests to
be merry or entertaining. But although the very title of the proposed
work carried in it an obstruction to its effect, this was far from being
suspected at the time, for the popularity of the editor, and of his
compositions, seemed a warrant for his success. The distinguished favour with which the Castle Spectre
was received upon the stage,[78]
seemed an additional pledge for the safety of his new attempt. I readily
agreed to contribute the ballads of ‘Glenfinlas’ and
of ‘The Eve of Saint John,’ with one or two others of less merit;
and my friend Dr. Leyden became also a contributor. Mr. Southey, a tower
of strength, added ‘The Old Woman of
In the meantime, my friend Lewis found it no easy matter to discipline his
northern recruits. He was a martinet, if I may so term him, in the
accuracy of rhymes and of numbers; I may add, he had a right to be so, for few
persons have exhibited more mastery of rhyme, or greater command over the
melody of verse. He was, therefore, rigid in exacting similar accuracy
from others, and as I was quite unaccustomed to the mechanical part of poetry, and
used rhymes which were merely permissible, as readily as those which were
legitimate, contests often arose amongst us, which were exasperated by the
pertinacity of my Mentor, who, as all who knew him can testify, was no granter
of propositions. As an instance of the obstinacy with which I had so
lately adopted a tone of defiance to criticism, the reader will find in the Appendix a few specimens of the lectures which I underwent
from my friend Lewis, and which did not at the time produce any effect on my
inflexibility, though I did not forget them at a future period.
The proposed publication of the Tales of Wonder was, from one reason or
another, postponed till the year 1801,[80]
a circumstance by which, of itself, the success of the work was considerably
impeded, for protracted expectation always leads to disappointment. But,
besides, there were circumstances of various kinds which contributed to its
depreciation, some of which were imputable to the editor, or author, and some
to the bookseller.
The former remained insensible of the passion for ballads and ballad-mongers
having been for some time on the wane, and that with such alteration in the
public taste, the chance of success in that line was diminished. What had
been at first received as simple and natural, was now sneered at as puerile and
extravagant. Another objection was, that my
friend Lewis had a high but mistaken opinion of his own powers of humour.[81]
The truth was, that though he could throw some gaiety into his lighter pieces,
after the manner of the French writers, his attempts at what is called
pleasantry in English, wholly wanted the quality of humour,
and were generally failures. But this he would not allow; and the Tales
of Wonder were filled, in a sense, with attempts at comedy which might be
generally accounted abortive.
Another objection, which might have been more easily foreseen, subjected the
editor to a charge of which Mat Lewis was entirely incapable—that of collusion
with his publisher in an undue attack on the pockets of the public. The Tales
of Wonder formed a work in royal octavo, and were,
by large printing, driven out,[82] as it is technically termed, to two
volumes, which were sold at a high price. Purchasers murmured at finding
that this size had been attained by the insertion of some of the best-known
pieces of the English language, such as Dryden’s
‘Theodore and Honoria,’ Parnell’s
‘Hermit,’ Lisle’s ‘Porsenna, King of Russia,’
and many other popular poems of old date, and generally known, which ought not
in conscience to have made part of a set of tales, ‘written and collected’ by a
modern author. His bookseller was also accused in the public
prints, whether truly or not I am uncertain, of having attempted to secure to
himself the entire profits of the large sale which he expected, by refusing to
his brethren the allowances usually, if not in all cases, made to the retail
trade.[83]
Lewis, one of the most liberal as well as benevolent of mankind, had not the
least participation in these proceedings of his bibliopolist; but
his work sunk under the obloquy which was heaped on it by the offended
parties. The book was termed Tales
of Plunder, was censured by
reviewers, and attacked in newspapers and magazines. A very clever parody
was made on the style and the person of the author, and the world laughed as
willingly as if it had never applauded.[84]
Thus, owing to the failure of the vehicle I had chosen, my efforts to present
myself before the public as an original writer proved as vain as those by which
I had previously endeavoured to distinguish myself as a translator. Like Lord Home, however, at
the battle of Flodden, I did so far well, that I was able to stand and save
myself; and amidst the general depreciation of the Tales of Wonder, my
small share of the obnoxious publication was dismissed without much censure,
and in some cases obtained praise from the critics.[85]
The consequence of my escape made me naturally more daring, and I attempted, in
my own name, a collection of ballads of various kinds, both ancient and modern,
to be connected by the common tie of relation to the Border districts, in which
I had gathered the materials. The original preface explains my purpose,
and the assistance of various kinds which I met with. The edition was
curious, as being the first work[86]
printed by my friend and schoolfellow, Mr. James Ballantyne,
who, at that period, was editor of a provincial newspaper, called The Kelso Mail. When the book came out, in
1802, the imprint, Kelso, was read with wonder by amateurs of typography, who
had never heard of such a place, and were astonished at the example of handsome
printing which so obscure a town produced.
As for the editorial part of the task, my attempt to imitate the plan and style
of Bishop Percy, observing only more strict fidelity concerning my originals,
was favourably received by the public, and there was
a demand within a short space for a second edition, to which I proposed to add
a third volume. Messrs. Cadell and Davies, the
first publishers of the work, declined the publication of this second edition,
which was undertaken, at a very liberal price, by the well-known firm of
Messrs. Longman and Rees of Paternoster Row. My progress in the literary
career in which I might now be considered as seriously engaged, the reader will
find briefly traced in an Introduction prefixed to the Lay of the Last Minstrel.[87]
In the meantime the Editor has accomplished his proposed task of acquainting
the reader with some particulars respecting the modern imitations of the
Ancient Ballad, and the circumstances which gradually, and almost insensibly,
engaged himself in that species of literary
employment. W. S.
ABBOTSFORD, April 1830.
EXTRACTS
FROM THE CORRESPONDENCE OF
M. G.
LEWIS
My attention was called to this subject,
which is now of an old date, by reading the following passage in Medwin’s Account of
Some Passages in Lord Byron’s later Years.[88] Lord Byron is supposed to
speak: ‘When Walter Scott began to write poetry, which was not at a very
early age, Monk Lewis corrected his verse: he understood little then of the mechanical
part of the art. The ‘Fire King,’ in the Minstrelsy of the Scottish
Border, was almost all Lewis’s. One of the Ballads in that work, and,
except some of Leyden’s, perhaps one of the best, was made from a story picked
up in a stage-coach—I mean that of ‘Will Jones.’
‘They boil’d Will Jones within the pot,
And not much fat had Will.’
‘I hope Walter Scott did not write the review on “Christabel ”; for he
certainly, in common with many of us, is indebted to Coleridge. But for
him, perhaps, The Lay of the Last Minstrel would never have been thought
of. The line,
“Jesu Maria shield thee
well!”
is word for word from Coleridge.’
There are some parts of this passage extremely mistaken and exaggerated, as
generally attends any attempt to record what passes in casual conversation,
which resembles, in difficulty, the experiments of the old chemists for fixing
quicksilver.
The following is a specimen of my poor friend Lewis’s criticism on my juvenile
attempts at ballad poetry; severe enough, perhaps, but for which I was much
indebted to him, as forcing upon the notice of a young and careless author
hints which the said author’s vanity made him unwilling to attend to, but which
were absolutely necessary to any hope of his ultimate success.
Supposed 1799
‘THANK you for your revised “Glenfinlas.” I grumble, but say no more
on this subject, although I hope you will not be so inflexible on that
of your other Ballads; for I do not despair of convincing you in time, that a bad
rhyme is, in fact, no rhyme at all. You desired me to point out my
objections, leaving you at liberty to make use of them or not; and so have at
“Frederic and Alice.” Stanza 1st, “hies”
and “ joys” are not rhymes; the 1st stanza ends with “ joys”;
the 2nd begins with “ joying.” In
the 4th, there is too sudden a change of tenses, “flows” and “rose.” 6th, 7th, and 8th, I like
much. 9th, Does not “ring his ears” sound ludicrous in
yours? The first idea that presents itself is, that his ears were pulled;
but even the ringing of the ears does
not please. 12th, “Shower” and “roar,”
not rhymes. “Soil” and “aisle” in the 13th are not
much better; but “head” and “descried”
are execrable. In the 14th, “bar” and “stair”
are ditto; and “groping” is a nasty word.
Vide Johnson, “He gropes his
breeches with a monarch’s air.” In the 15th you change your metre, which has always an unpleasant effect; and “safe”
and “receive” rhyme just about as well as Scott and Lewis would.
16th, “Within” and “strain” are not rhymes. 17th, “Hear”
and “air,” not rhymes. 18th, Two metres
are mixed; the same objection to the third line
of the 19th. Observe, that, in the Ballad, I do not always object to a
variation of metre; but
then it ought to increase the melody, whereas, in my opinion, in these
instances, it is diminished.
‘THE CHASE.—12th, The 2nd line
reads very harshly; and “choir” and “lore” are not
rhymes. 13th, “Rides” and “side”
are not rhymes. 30th, “Pour” and “obscure,”
not rhymes. 40th, “Spreads” and “invades” are not
rhymes. 46th, “Rends” and “ascend” are not
rhymes.
‘WILLIAM AND HELEN.—In order that I may bring it nearer
the original title, pray introduce, in the first stanza, the name of Ellenora, instead of Ellen. “Crusade”
and “sped,” not rhymes in the 2nd. 3rd, “Made” and “shed”
are not rhymes; and if they were, come too close to the rhymes in the
2nd. In the 4th, “Joy” and “victory” are not rhymes.
7th, The first line wants a verb, otherwise is not
intelligible. 13th, “Grace” and “bliss” are not
rhymes. 14th, “Bale” and “hell” are not rhymes. 16th,
“Vain” and “fruit-less” is tautology; and as a verb is wanted,
the line will run better thus, “And vain is every prayer.” 19th, Is not “to her” absolutely necessary in the 4th
line? 20th, “Grace” and “bliss,” not
rhymes. 21st, “Bale” and “hell,” not
rhymes. 22nd, I do not like the word “spent.” 23rd, “O’er”
and “star” are vile rhymes. 26th, A verb is wanted in the 4th
line; better thus, “Then whispers thus a voice.” 28th, Is
not, “Is’t thou, my love?” better than “My love ! my love !”? 31st, If “wight” means, as I
conjecture, “enchanted,” does not this let the cat out of bag?
Ought not the spur to be sharp rather than bright? In the
4th line, “Stay” and “day” jingle together; would it not be
better, “ I must be gone e’er [sic] day ?” 32nd, “Steed”
and “bed” are not rhymes. 34th, “Bride”
and “bed,” not rhymes. 35th, “Seat”
and “await,” not rhymes. 39th, “Keep hold” and “sit
fast” seem to my ear vulgar and
prosaic. 40th, The 4th line is defective in
point of English, and, indeed, I do not quite understand the
meaning. 43rd, “Arose” and “pursues” are not
rhymes. 45th, I am not pleased with the epithet “savage”; and the
latter part of the stanza is, to me, unintelligible. 49th, Is it not closer to the original in line 3rd to say, “Swift
ride the dead”? 50th, Does the rain “whistle”?
55th, line 3rd, Does it express, “Is Helen afraid of them ?”
59th, “Door” and “flower” do not rhyme together. 60th, “Scared” and “heard” are not rhymes.
63rd, “Bone” and “skeleton,” not rhymes. 64th, The last line sounds ludicrous; one fancies the heroine
coming down with a plump, and sprawling upon her bottom. I have now
finished my severe examination, and pointed out every objection which I
think can be suggested.’
6th
January 1799.
Wellwyn, —1799
‘ Dear Scott,
‘Your last Ballad reached me just as I was stepping into my chaise to go to
Brocket Hall (Lord Melbourne’s), so I took it with me, and exhibited both that
and “Glenfinlas” with great success. I must
not, however, conceal from you, that nobody understood the Lady Flora of
Glengyle to be disguised demon till the catastrophe
arrived; and that the opinion was universal, that some previous stanzas ought
to be introduced descriptive of the nature and office of the wayward Ladies
of the Wood. William Lambe,[89] too (who writes good verses himself,
and, therefore, may be allowed to judge those of other people), was decidedly
for the omission of the last stanza but one. These were the only
objections started. I thought it as well that you should know them,
whether you attend to them or not. With regard to “St. John’s Eve,” I
like it much, and instead of finding fault with its broken metre,
I approve of it highly. I think, in this last Ballad, you have hit off
the ancient manner better than in your former ones. “Glenfinlas,”
for example, is more like a polished tale, than an old Ballad.[90] But why, in verse 6th, is the
Baron’s helmet hacked and hewed, if (as we are given to understand) he had
assassinated his enemy? Ought not tore to
be torn? Tore seems to me not English. In verse 16th,
the last line is word for word from “Gil Morrice.”
21st, “Floor and “bower” are not rhymes,’ etc., etc., etc.
The gentleman noticed in the following letter, as partaker in the author’s
heresies respecting rhyme, had the less occasion to justify such licence, as his own have been singularly
accurate. Mr. Smythe is now Professor of
Modern History at
‘I
must not omit telling you, for your own comfort and that of all such
persons as are wicked enough to make bad rhymes, that Mr. Smythe (a very clever man at Cambridge) took great pains
the other day to convince me, not merely that a bad rhyme might pass, but that
occasionally a bad rhyme was better than a good one!!!!!! I need not tell
you that he left me as great an infidel on this subject as he found me.
‘Ever yours,
‘M. G. Lewis.’
The next letter respects the Ballad called
the ‘Fire King,’ stated by Captain Medwin to be
almost all Lewis’s. This is an entire misconception. Lewis,
who was very fond of his idea of four elementary kings, had prevailed on me to
supply a Fire King. After being repeatedly urged to the task, I sat down
one day after dinner, and wrote the ‘Fire King,’ as it was published in the Tales
of Wonder. The next extract gives an account of the manner in
which Lewis received it, which was not very favourable;
but instead of writing the greater part, he did not write a single word of
it. Dr. Leyden, now no more, and another gentlemen who still
survives, were sitting at my side while I wrote it; nor
did my occupation prevent the circulation of the bottle.
Leyden wrote a ballad for the Cloud King,
which is mentioned in the ensuing extract. But it did not answer Mat’s
ideas, either in the colour of the wings, or some
point of costume equally important; so Lewis, who was otherwise fond of the
Ballad, converted it into the Elfin King, and wrote a Cloud King himself, to
finish the hierarchy in the way desired.
There is a leading mistake in the passage from Captain Medwin.
The Minstrelsy of the Border is spoken of, but what is meant is the Tales
of Wonder. The former work contains none of the Ballads
mentioned by Mr. Medwin—the latter has them
all. Indeed, the dynasty of Elemental Kings were
written entirely for Mr. Lewis’s publication.
My intimate friend, William Clerk, Esq., was the person who heard the legend of
Bill Jones told in a mail coach by a sea-captain, who imagined himself to have seen the ghost to which it relates.
The tale was versified by Lewis himself. I forget where it was published,
but certainly in no miscellany or publication of mine.
I have only to add, in allusion to the passage I have quoted, that I never
wrote a word parodying either Mr. Coleridge or any one else, which, in that
distinguished instance, it would have been most ungracious in me to have done;
for which the reader will see reasons in the Introduction to The Lay of the
Last Minstrel.’
‘ Dear Scott,
‘ I Return you
many thanks for your Ballad and the Extract, and I shall be very much obliged
to your friend for the “Cloud King.” I must, however, make one criticism
upon the stanzas which you sent me. The Spirit, being a wicked one, must
not have such delicate wings as pale-blue ones. He has nothing to do with
Heaven except to deface it with storms; and, therefore, in The Monk, I
have fitted him with a pair of sable pinions, to which I must request your
friend to adapt his stanza. With the others I am much pleased, as I am
with your “Fire King”; but everybody makes the same objection to it, and
expresses a wish that you had conformed your spirit to the description given of
him in The Monk, where his office is to play the Will-o’-the-Wisp, and
lead travelers into bogs, etc. It also objected to, his being
removed from his native land, Denmark, to Palestine; and that the office
assigned to him in your Ballad has nothing peculiar to the “Fire King,” but
would have suited Arimanes, Beelzebub, or any other
evil spirit as well. However, the Ballad itself I think very
pretty. I suppose you have heard from
‘ M. G. L.’
Works Cited
Anon. Tales of Terror.
Bannerman, Anne. Tales of Superstition.
Bürger, Gottfried August. “Lenore.” Musenalmanach.
Cartwright , Edmund. Armine
and Elvira.
Chatterton, Thomas. Poems Supposed to
Have Been Written at
Cochrane, J.G. Catalog of the Library
at Abbotsford.
Craciun, Adriana. Fatal
Women of Romanticism.
Cunningham,
Allan. The Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters,
Sculptors, and Architects. 6 vol.
Ellis,
George. Specimens of the Early English Poets.
Third ed.
Finlay , John. “Dirge.” from Wallace; or, the Vale of Ellerslie.
With Other Poems.
Glaister, Geoffrey Asher. Glossary
of the Book.
Gray, Thomas. “The Progress of Poetry: A
Pindaric Ode.” Odes by Mr. Gray. Printed at Strawberry-Hill for R. and J. Dodsley,
1757.
Herd, David. Antient and Modern Sco[t]tish Songs. Second
ed.
Herder, Johann Gottfried. Volkslieder.
2 vols.
Hogg, James. The Mountain Bard.
Johnson, James. The
Lewis, Matthew Gregory. Castle Spectre.
---. Tales of Wonder. 2 vols.
---. The Monk.
Johnston, George P. “The First Book Printed by James Ballantyne.” Publications of the
(1896).
Leyden, John (ed.) The Complaynt of
---. Descriptive Poems.
Lockhart , J.G. Memoirs
of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. 7 volumes.
---. Ancient Spanish Ballads: Historical and Romantic.
Macpherson, James. The Works of Ossian, Son of Fingal.
Mackenzie, Henry. Account of the German Theatre.
---.The
Man of Feeling.
Mallet, David. Edwin
and Emma.
---. “William and
Margaret.” Aaron Hill’s Plain Dealer 36 (July
1724).
Mathias, James T. The Pursuits
of Literature: A Satirical Poem in Dialogue. With Notes.
2nd Ed. London: T. Beckett, 1797.
Medwin, Thomas. Conversations
of Lord Byron: Noted During a Residence with His Lordship at
1824.
249-250.
Mickle, William Julius.
The Poetical Works of William Mickle.
Percy,
Thomas. Reliques of Ancient English Poetry:
Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs, and Other Pieces of Our Earlier Poets.
3 vols.
Dodsley, 1765.
Ramsay,
Allan. The Tea-Table Miscellany
Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song. Ed. Robert Hartley Cromek.
Rimbault, Edward F. “Our King He Went to
Ritson, Joseph. Ancient Songs, and Ballads: From
the Time of King Henry the Second to the Revolution. London: J. Johnson,
1790—actually printed 1792.
Scott,
Walter. Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.
---. The Chase, and William and Helen.
---. The Eve of
---.
The Lay of the Last Minstrel.
---
(ed). The
Works of John Dryden. 18 vol.
Steele,
Richard. “The History of Santon Barisa.” The Guardian 148 (August 31, 1713).
Taylor,
William. “Lenora.” Monthly Magazine 1 (March 1796): 135-37.
Thomson, George. A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the
Voice. Five vol.
Tytler, Alexander Fraser. The Robbers.
Watson-Taylor, George. Pieces of
Poetry: With Two Dramas. Chiswick: Whittingham, 1830.
[1] (L) This essay was written in April
1830, and forms a continuation of the ‘Remarks on Popular Poetry,’ printed in
the first volume of the present series. [Minstrelsy of the
Scottish Borders. The “Introductory Remarks on Popular Poetry and on
the Various Collections of Ballads of
[2] (S) He might be supposed a contemporary
of Henry VIII., if the greeting which he pretends to
have given to that monarch is of his own composition, and spoken in his own
person.
‘Good morrow to our noble king’ quoth I;
‘Good morrow,’ quoth he to thou:
And then he said to Anthony,
‘O Anthony, now, now, now.’
[Information on this old ballad cited by
Scott can be found in Edward F. Rimbault’s “Our King
He Went to
[3] A
[4] Joseph Ritson
(1753-1802), antiquarian, literary scholar, and notorious polemicist. He
edited Ancient Songs, and Ballads: From the Time of King Henry the Second to
the Revolution (
[5] (H) ‘Fair Rosamond’ (c. 1592-3),
of which there are black-letter copies in the Roxburghe,
Pepys, and Wood Collections, was written by Thomas Delone.
[?-1600, known as the “Balleting Silke Weaver of
[6] The ballad
“Chevy Chase” records the story of a large hunting party (or “chase”) in the
border region of the
[7] (S) Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy.
[8] (S) A curious and spirited specimen
occurs in
[9] (L) Pills to Purge Melancholy.
(H) It first appeared in 1684; reissue, enlarged, 5 vols.,
1699-1714; and a final ed., 6 vols., 1719-1720.
[10] (L)
See Hogg’s Jacobite Relics, vol. i. (H) This ballad, modelled
on older ones on Killiecrankie, etc., appeared as a
broadside, and is included in Herd’s Songs, 1776, vol. i. 109-12.
[11] The
[12] (L) Miss
Ray, the beautiful mistress of the Earl of
[13] This ballad
can be found in Allan Ramsay’s Tea-Table Miscellany (1724-1727). The
second stanza reads: “His thoughts on honour always
run, / He ne’er could bow to love, / No nymph in all the land had charms / His
frozen heart to move.”
[14] “Lucy and
Colin” by Thomas Tickell (1685-1740).
[15] The ballad commemorating the victory of Hardyknute over Norse invaders is usually attributed to
Lady Elizabeth Wardlaw, who presented it in 1719 as
an authentic ancient text. “Hardyknute” is included
in Percy’s Reliques.
[16] (L) ‘Hardyknute was the first poem that I ever learnt—the last
that I shall forget.’—Ms. Note of Sir Walter Scott on a leaf
of Allan Ramsay’s Tea-Table Miscellany.
[17] (S) This
failure applies to the repairs and rifacimentos of
old ballads, as well as to complete imitations. In the beautiful and
simple ballad of ‘Gil Morris,’ some affected person has struck in one or two
factitious verses, which, like vulgar persons in a
drawing-room, betray themselves by their over-finery. Thus, after the
simple and affecting verse which prepares the readers for the
coming tragedy—
‘Gil Morrice sat in good green wood,
He whistled and he sang;
O what mean a’ yon folk coming,
My mother tarries lang?
some such
‘vicious intromitter’ as we have described (to use a
barbarous phrase for a barbarous proceeding) has inserted the following
quintessence of affectation:
‘His locks were like the threads of gold,
Drawn from Minerva’s loom;
His lips like roses drapping dew,
His breath was a’ perfume.
His brow was like the mountain snow,
Gilt by the morning beam ;
His cheeks like living roses blow,
His een
like azure stream.
The boy was clad in robes of green,
Sweet as the infant spring ;
And like the mavis on the bush,
He gart the valleys
ring.’
[“Vicious intromission” is a term from
Scottish law: it refers to the act of meddling with the effects of a deceased
person, without the supervision of legal authority to guard against
embezzlement. The penalty for the act requires the offender to pay all
the debts of the deceased. James Boswell and Dr. Johnson argued in support of
this law.]
[18] Frere
(1769-1846), English diplomat best known in literary terms as a contributor to
the Antijacobin Review. Frere’s “metrical version” of the battle song from the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle appears in volume I of the third edition of Ellis’s Specimens
of the Early English Poets (Edinburgh: James Ballantyne,
1811).
[19] The
controversy concerned Poems Supposed to Have
Been Written at Bristol by Thomas Rowley and Others, in the Fifteenth Century
(1777),
actually written by Chatterton.
[20] (H) See post,
‘Thomas the Rhymer,’ Parts Second
and Third. [First appearing in Minstrelsy of the Scottish
Border (1802).]
[21] Ritson attacked Percy in the preface to his Ancient Songs, and Ballads: From the Time of King Henry the Second
to the Revolution.
[22] Thomson’s A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs
for the Voice came out in
five volumes from 1799-1815.
[23] James Johnson’s The Scots Musical
Museum.
[24] (S)
Peter Buchan’s version was probably mainly the work of his modern ‘wight of Homer’s craft,’ so that in this case the
comparison would be between Burns and the ‘wight.’
Burns’s version was, he states, his own, all except the first half-stanza.
[25] “Dirge” by the Scottish poet John Finlay (1782-1810), from his Wallace;
or, the Vale of Ellerslie. With Other Poems.
[26] Scottish poet William Julius Mickle (1735-88), best known for his translation of Luís de Camões’ epic poem The Lusiad, or the Discovery of
[27] Irish
poet (1779-1852), best known for his Irish Melodies
(1808-34).
[28] John Leyden
(1775-1811) was Scott’s good friend and joined him in submitting poems to M.G.
Lewis’s Tales of Wonder (1801).
[29] Scottish poet
(1765-1829). The Tales were printed for Vernor
and Hood, by J. Swan, 1802 and are now available on line. See
Adriana Craciun’s “Anne
Bannerman: A Critical Introduction” from Scottish Women Poets
from the Romantic Period. Also see Craciun’s
discussion of Bannerman in her Fatal Women of Romanticism (
[31] Addison’s
praise for “
[32]
“Edwin and Emma” by the Scottish poet and playwright David Mallet (1705-1765)
was first published in
[33]
Mallet’s ballad first appeared in Aaron Hill’s Plain Dealer 36 (July
1724). Percy in his printing of the poem in the Reliques
believed its source to be the old ballad “Fair Margaret and Sweet William”
(inspired by lines from John Fletcher’s Knight of the Burning Pestle).
[34] (H)
Mallet’s ballad is now known to be a slight alteration of another vamp, of
which there is a copy with music in the
[35] Actually Armine and Elvira (
[36] (S)
If I am right in what must be a very early recollection, I saw Mr. Cartwright
(then a student of medicine at the
[38] (L) Percy was
specially annoyed, according to Boswell, with
‘I put my hat upon my head,
And walked into the
And there I met another man,
With his hat in his hand.’
[Johnson composed these stanzas ex
tempore to mock Percy’s The Hermit of Warkworth (1771); the
story is recounted in Boswell’s Life of Johnson.]
[39] (S) See the
Introduction to Lockhart’s Spanish Ballads, 1823, p. xxii.
[40] Most likely an allusion to the “Introduction” to The Lay of the
Last Minstrel, wherein Scott discusses his abandonment of his law career
for literary pursuits.
[41] “narrow circumstances at home.”
[42] William Hayley (1745-1820), English writer of various poetic
epistles and best known for his biography of Cowper.
[43] Names used
to designate Samuel Rogers (1762-1855), author of “The Pleasures of Memory”
(1792) and Thomas Campbell (1777-1844), author of “The Pleasures of Hope”
(1799). In 1812 Scott recommended
[44] William
Cowper (1731-1800), English poet and hymnodist, best known for his long blank
verse poem The Task (1785).
[45] (L) ‘Flammantia moenia mundi.’ –
Lucretius. [De Rerum Natura, i. 74. Also see
Thomas Gray’s “He [meaning
[46] Account of the German Theatre.
[47] Chapter II
of Lockhart’s Life of Scott provides an entertaining account of Scott’s
German studies.
[48] (L)
Alexander Fraser Tytler, a Judge of the Court of
Session by the title of Lord Woodhouselee, author of
the well-known Elements of General History, and long eminent as
Professor of History in the University of Edinburgh. He died in 1810.
[49] In 1792
Lewis traveled to
[50] Lewis found
“The History of Santon Barisa”
recounted by Richard Steele in The Guardian 148 (August 31, 1713).
[51] Actually, 1796.
[52] James
Mathias blasted Lewis’s novel in the fourth part of The Pursuits of
Literature: A Satirical Poem in Dialogue. With Notes. 2nd
Ed. London: T. Beckett, 1797.
[53] Mathias’s
original lines read: “No German nonsense sways my English heart, / Unused at
ghosts or rattling bones to start” (4. 73-74).
[54] Ann
Radcliffe (1764-1823), mother of the female Gothic novel, whose use of the
so-called “explained supernatural”—in which seemingly fantastic events are
eventually assigned to natural causes—differs markedly from Lewis’s more
sensational Gothicism.
[55] See
Appendix E (“Variants”) of Macdonald’s and Scherf’s
edition of The Monk for the full record of Lewis’s mollifications.
[56] (S) In
justice to a departed friend, I have subjoined his own defence
against an accusation so remorselessly persisted in. The following is an
extract of a letter to his father:
Feb. 23, 1798.
‘MY DEAR FATHER,– Though certain that the clamour
raised against The Monk cannot have given you the smallest doubt of the
rectitude of my intentions, or the purity of my principles, yet I am conscious
that it must have grieved you to find any doubts on the subject existing in the
minds of other people. To express my sorrow for having given you pain is my
motive for now addressing you, and also to assure you, that you shall not feel
that pain a second time on my account. Having made you feel it at all, would be
a sufficient reason, had I no others, to make me regret having published the
first edition of The Monk; but I have others, weaker, indeed, than the
one mentioned, but still sufficiently strong. I perceive that I have put too
much confidence in the accuracy of my own judgment; that, convinced of my
object being unexceptionable, I did not sufficiently examine whether the means
by which I attained that object were equally so; and that, upon many accounts,
I have to accuse myself of high imprudence. Let me,
however, observe that twenty is notthe age at which
prudence is most to be expected. Inexperience prevented my distinguishing what
would give offence; but as soon as I found that offence was given, I made the
only reparation in my power – I carefully revised the work, and expunged every
syllable on which could be grounded the slightest construction of immorality.
This, indeed, was no difficult task; for the objections rested entirely on
expressions too strong, and words carelessly chosen not on the sentiments, characters,
or general tendency of the work; that the latter is undeserving
censure, Addison will vouch for me. The moral and outline of my story are taken
from an allegory inserted by him in the Guardian, and which he commends
highly for ability of invention and ‘propriety of object.’Unluckily, in working it up, I
thought that the stronger my colours, the more effect
would my picture produce; and it never struck me, that the exhibition of vice
in her temporary triumph, might possibly do as much harm, as her final exposure
and punishment could do good. To do much good, indeed, was more
than I expected of my book; having always believed that our conduct depends on
our own hearts and characters, not on the books we read, orthe
sentiments we hear. But though I did not hope much benefit to arise from the
perusal of a trifling romance, written by a youth of twenty, I was in my
own mind convinced that no harm could be produced by a work whose subject was
furnished by one of our best moralists, and in the composition of which I did
not introduce a single incident, or a single character, without meaning to
illustrate some maxim universally allowed. It was then with infinite surprise
that I heard the outcry raised against the * * * *’
[I regret that the letter, though once perfect, now only exists in my
possession as a fragment. – W.S.]
[57] Johann
August Musäus, “Die Entführung”
[“The Enlopement”] from Die Volksmärchen
(1782).
[58] The poem
employs anapestic meter and was widely imitated; for an example, see Robert
Southey’s “Poor Mary, the
Maid of the Inn.”
[59] (L) The
Lady Charlotte Bury.
[60] (S) This
tree grew in a very large garden attached to a cottage at Kelso, the residence
of my father’s sister, where I spent many of the happiest days of my
youth. (H) See further Lockhart’s Life
of Scott.
[61] Perhaps
Robert Shortreed, Sheriff-substitute of
Roxburghshire, who accompanied Scott on what he called his “raids”into
Liddesdale and the surrounding country in his search
for ancient Scottish ballads.
[62] From Don Sebastian, a Tragedy by John Dryden.
Scott edited the first collected works of Dryden in 1808.
[63] Other
translations of “Lenore” in 1795-96 include those by John Thomas Stanley, poet-laureate
Henry J. Pye, William Robert Spencer, and
William Taylor of
[64] Taylor was
a student of Barbauld’s at her Palgrave,
[65] (S) Born
Countess Harriet Bruhl of Martinskirchen,
and married to Hugh Scott, Esq, of Harden, the
author’s relative and much-valued friend almost from infancy. (H) See further
Lockhart’s Life of Scott. In 1835 Mr. Scott of Harden’s right of
succession, through his mother, to the peerage of Polwarth
was allowed by the House of Lords.
[66] See note #2
of “William
and Helen.”
[67] (L) This
thin quarto was published by Messrs. Manners and Miller of
[68] (L) This
list here referred to was drawn up and inserted in the Caledonian Mercury,
by Mr. James Shaw, for thirty years past in the house of Sir Walter Scott’s
publishers, Messrs. Constable and Cadell of
Edinburgh; and use will be made of it hereafter.
[69] (L) Sir
Walter Scott’s second publication was a translation of Goethe’s drama of Goetz
of Berlichingen with the Iron Hand, which appeared in 1799. He about
the same time translated several other German plays, which yet remain in MS..
[70] (L) The
late George Constable, Esq. See Introduction to The Antiquary.
[71] (S) Among
the popular Ballads, or Volkslieder, of the celebrated Herder, is (take one
instance out of many) a version of the old Scottish song of ‘Sir Patrick
Spence,’ in which, but for difference of orthography, the two languages can be
scarcely distinguished from each other. For example:
‘The King sits in Dumfermling
town,
‘Der Koenig sitzt in Dumfermling Schloss,
Drinking the blood
red
wine;
Er trinkt
blutrothen Wein;
“Where will I get a good
skipper
“O wo treff’ ich einen Segler
gut
To
sail this ship of mine?”’
Dies Schiff zu segeln
mein ?”
In like manner, the opening stanza of
‘Child Waters,’ and many other Scottish ballads, fall as naturally and easily
into the German habits and forms of speech, as if they had originally been
composed in that language:
‘About Yule, when the wind was cule,
‘In Christmessfast in Winter
kalt,
And the round
tables
began,
Als Tafel rund began;
O there is come to our king’s
court
Da kam zu
König’s Hoff und Hall
Mony weel favour’d
man.’
Manch wackner Ritter an.’
It requires only a smattering of both
languages to see at what cheap expense, even of vocables
and rhymes, the popular poetry of the one may be transferred to the
other. Hardly anything is more flattering to a Scottish student of
German; it resembles the unexpected discovery of an old friend in a foreign
land.
[72] From Absolom and Achitophel 116-17. Scott references and somewhat
downplays the controversy occasioned by James Macpherson’s Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem in Six Books, together with
Several Other Poems composed by Ossian, the Son of Fingal,
translated from the Gaelic Language (1761).
Many critics, most formidably Dr. Johnson, rightly challenged the authenticity
of these purportedly “found” documents, and although we now know that much of
the material was composed by Macpherson, his works played a large role in
the revival of interest in Gaelic and “ancient” poetry at the end of the
eighteenth-century.
[73] “Glenfinlas” first appeared in Lewis’s Tales of Wonder
but without any claim or pretense of being based on a “Gaelic model.” Scott’s
bemused comment on how the Gothic necessity of isolating his characters
contradicts actual
[74] First
published as The Eve of St. John: A Border Ballad.
Kelso: James Ballantyne, 1800. Also appears in Tales
of Wonder.
[75] (S) This is
of little consequence, except in as far as it contradicts a story which I have
seen in print, averring that Mr. Scott of Harden was himself about to destroy
the ancient building ; than which nothing can be more
inaccurate. (H) See further regarding
[76] In The
Spectator Addison relates how “Moliere, as we are told by Monsieur Boileau, used to read all of his comedies to an old woman
who was his housekeeper” (No. 70, May 21, 1711).
[77] (L) See the
account of a conversation between Sir Walter Scott and Sir Thomas Lawrence, in Cunningham’s Lives of British Painters,
etc., vol. vi. p. 236.
[78] Lewis’s
Gothic melodrama was performed forty-seven times at
[79]
[80] This
postponement in part led to the printing of An Apology for
Tales of Terror (1799).
[81] Lewis
included several parodies of Gothic ballads in his collection, including one,
“Giles Jollup the Grave, and Brown Sally Green,” that
burlesqued his most famous poem, “Alonzo the Brave, and Fair Imogine.” This “French” waggishness perplexed and
irritated reviewers of the Tales of Wonder.
[82] Geoffrey
Asher Glaister’s Glossary of the Book
offers two definitions of this “technical” term: “1. said of type which
occupies much lateral space. 2. an instruction
to the compositor that wide spaces are to be inserted between words” (147).
[83] See
Thomson’s Broadview edition for information on the book’s reception and the
dealings of Lewis’s publisher, Joseph Bell.
[84] Possibly a
reference to the anonymous Tales of Terror (May 1801), which contains a
number of parodies directly aimed at Lewis and his ballads from Tales of
Wonder. But the more likely candidate is George Watson-Taylor’s “The
Old Hag in a Red Cloak,” which contains an attack, as Scott notes, on “the
person of the author”:
Mat Lewis was little, Mat Lewis was young,
The words they lisp’d prettily over his tongue;
A spy-glass he us’d, for he could not well see,
A spy-glass he us’d, for near-sighted was he.
Cochrane’s Catalog of the Library at Abbotsord notes that Scott owned a manuscript copy of
this poem (251).
[85] Scott is correct: despite the
generally harsh tenor of the reviews, critics from the British Critic (16
[December 1801]: 681) and the Poetical Register (1 [1801]: 436-37)
reserved praise for Scott’s ballads. The critic from the Antijacobin
Review (8 [March 1801]: 322-27) remarks that Scott “seems to be the best of
the new species of horror-breeding Bards” and prints “The Wild
Huntsman.”
[86] As first
pointed out by George P. Johnston in his “The
First Book Printed by James Ballantyne,” the actual
first book was An Apology for
Tales of Terror (1799), not Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border
(1802).
[87] The “Introduction”
was published for an 1830 edition of the poem and intended to “resume the story
of my literary labors at which I broke off in the Essay on the Imitation of
Popular Poetry” [sic], a title that conflates the two prefatory
essays in the 1830 Minstrelsy. However, as the present “Essay” twice
references what appears an already completed “Introduction” to the Lay,
the order of composition of these three biographical-literary essays is
uncertain. Paul Barnaby of the Walter Scott Digital Archive reasonably
conjectures that “a) Scott essentially wrote the two new introductory essays to
the 'Minstrelsy' and the introduction to the 'Lay' in tandem; b) the pieces did
not appear in the order that he'd initially expected; and c) that they were
slightly re-edited to fit the new order of appearance but that one or more
loose ends were left” (personal correspondence).
[88] Conversations
of Lord Byron: Noted During a Residence with His Lordship at
[89] (L) Now
Lord Melbourne. (H) The second Lord Melbourne (1779-1848), afterwards Prime
Minister. He was then a contributor of verse to Monk Lewis’s weekly paper
The Bugle.
[90] Scott claims in his 1806 “Introduction” to
The Minstrelsy that “The Eve of
[91] (H) He
published English Lyrics, 1797, of which a fifth edition with memoir
appeared in 1850.
[92] Lewis’s
recent biographer, D.L. Macdonald, suggests that the death of Lewis’s brother