Tweed; to adorn it after his heart's desire with symbols of the chivalric past; and to live the life of a noble and hospitable country gentleman, among his dogs and horses, and with picturesque landscapes on every side.

Having become the most prominent poet in Britain, Scott was now eclipsed by the new luminary, Lord Byron. "He beat ne, says Scott, with an excess of both modesty and praise, “he beat me out of the field in descriptions of the stronger passions and in deep-seated knowledge of the human heart." From the narrative poem, Scott now definitely turned to the prose romance. Adapting to his own needs the art of the eighteenth-century English novelists, he finished Waverley, which he had begun years before; and so inaugurated the long series of "Waverley Novels," upon which his fame was destined to rest more securely than upon his verse.

He wrote these novels with astonishing rapidity a rapidity accelerated, in his last years, by the financial failure of his publishers and his voluntary effort to debt of £117,000. The effort shortened his life; but at his death half the sum had been earned, and the rest was made up by subsequent royalties.

remove

In all his writings Scott was largely an improviser; he composed with amazing facility, and earned nearly a million dollars by his pen at the dear expense of quality. Rarely did he have that facility which the highest genius often attains, facility in conjunction with intensity and penetration; though he approximated it in scattered scenes of his novels, and in some of the lyrics included in his narrative poems. And his work as a whole, whatever its limitations, has that "health" or "harmony" which his countryman Carlyle held to be his most notable quality. Neither saint nor seer, Scott was a large, wholesome man.

The following quatrain, used by Scott as a motto for a chapter of Old Mortality, would serve admirably as a motto for his poems as a whole:

"Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife!

To all the sensual world proclaim,

1. Smaylho'me: Smallholm Tower, a romantic old castle in southern Scotland. It was familiar to Scott from childhood, and inspired this tale of the supernatural. 9. plate-jack: coat-armor.

10. vaunt-brace: armor protecting the arm from elbow to wrist.

II. sperthe: battle-ax.

(87.) 22. acton: jacket.

44. eiry: Scottish form of "eerie." 79. rood-stone: in medieval churches

a rood, or cross, stood at the entrance of the chancel, often with a figure of the Virgin Mary at one side and a figure of Saint John at the other. "By the rood" was a phrase used in swearing.

(88.) 108. Eildon-tree: a tree of legendary fame on Eildon Hill, near Melrose.

123. Dryburgh bells ring: Dryburgh and Melrose are ruined abbeys not far apart in the Scott country. - This stanza repeats the plot-irony of lines 85-88.

(90-97)

which he occupied. Here he was killed in battle, 1809; and his army at once took ship for England, abandoning the town to the French.

"The plummet-like fall of the heavy syllables of grief, as into an unknown depth, and the elastic rise, proper to the anapaestic measure, of the lighter ones, as though for heroic consolation, are worthy of the masters" (Oliver Elton, A Survey of English Literature, 1780-1830, Vol. I).

THOMAS MOORE (1779-1852)

Intimate and afterwards biographer of Byron, Moore was almost as popular with contemporary readers. He too, as illustrated in these three poems, sang freedom, love, and sad memory. He lacked his friend's power; but with a sweeter disposition, and an easier lyric tunefulness of style, he excelled as a writer of songs. As much musician as poet, he retouched the popular tunes of his native Ireland, and made verses for them. Of his Oriental tales, which are far less genuine, the most interesting is "Lalla Rookh" (1817).

THE HARP THAT ONCE

Tara, near Dublin, figures largely in Irish tale and verse as an ancient seat of kings.

OFT, IN THE STILLY NIGHT

(97.) 2, 12, 26. Slumber's chain: Does this fit the mood of the poem so well as the other images?

GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON (1788-1824)

George Gordon, sixth Lord Byron, was the son of "Mad Jack Byron," a military rake, and of Catherine Gordon, a Scottish heiress. His father, having squandered the fortune acquired by marriage, died when the boy was but three years old; and his mother, of a capricious and passionate temperament ("a fool" a schoolmate called

her, and her son replied, "I know it”), alternately gave him caresses and blows and thus did her part to make him sensi> tive, proud, rebellious, and hot-tempered. When only ten years old, he inherited the titles and estates of his uncle at Newstead Abbey. At Harrow, where he received his schooling from 1801 to 1805, he neglected his studies, but read widely, formed many friendships, and took part in athletic sports despite his handicap of lameness

a han

dicap of which he remained in after years morbidly conscious. Proceeding to Trinity College, Cambridge, he indulged his "tumultuous passions" in an irregular college career, shooting, boxing, swimming, gambling, falling in love, writing verse. While at Cambridge he published a volume of poems entitled Hours of Idleness, and, angered by a contemptuous criticism of the volume in the Edinburgh Review, he retaliated two years later with his satire, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. Not long before it was published, he took his seat in the House of Lords; and soon after it was published he left England for a tour, lasting two years, in the Mediterranean lands.

Returning from this "pilgrimage," Byron published, in 1812, two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. The effect was electric: "I awoke one morning," he said, "and found myself famous." He was lionized, he was read by everybody, he was a center of public interest. Following up his success, he wrote a series of Oriental tales in verse that attained an even greater popularity. In 1815 he married Anne Milbanke; the next year, because of his irregularities, she left him, returning to her father's home; while he, ostracized by the society that he had fascinated, abandoned the land of his birth and spent the rest of his years on the Continent.

Travelling in a large coach patterned on Napoleon's, Byron passed through Belgium, where he visited the field of Waterloo; and thence he proceeded up the Rhine to Lake Geneva, where he spent much time with Shelley. While in Switzerland, he finished the third canto of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" (page 99), wrote "The Prisoner of Chillon" (page 123), the "Epistle to Augusta" (page 121), the frag

ment entitled "Darkness" (page 128), "Prometheus" (page 127), and part of the dramatic poem "Manfred" (page 130). In the autumn of the same year, 1816, he passed on to Italy, the land of his exile till shortly before his death. Italy became the inspiration of the fourth canto of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" (page 153); and here he wrote the extraordinary "Don Juan" (page 160). After several years of residence at Venice, "the greenest island of my imagination," he removed to Ra

venna in order to be close to the Countess Guiccioli, a young girl who had married a widower of sixty. Later he "gave up to her his house at La Mira," residing there with her.

While living in Italy, Byron was actively interested in the movement for her independence; and at length a similar cause, the cause of Greece struggling for freedom, resolved him to dedicate himself to its service. At the opening of the year 1824 he reached Mesolonghi, worked ably and tirelessly in preparation for a military expedition against the Turks, and there he died, of fever, to the great grief of the Greek people and of his ardent admirers everywhere.

STANZAS FOR MUSIC (1815)

Compare the melancholy of this and various subsequent poems with the melancholy expressed by Coleridge in "Dejection: An Ode," having regard to the nature of the "joy" viewed in retrospect and the cause of the melancholy mood. Compare Byron's experience, also, with Wordsworth's ("Tintern Abbey," "Intimations of Immortality," "Ode to Duty," etc.).

CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE

As a narrative recounting the travels of Childe Harold, this long poem has a superficial unity. Fundamentally, however, it is a series of descriptive and reflective stanzas held together by the dominant personality of the "hero," who is, plainly, Byron himself. His flamboyant

temperament oscillates restlessly between enthusiasm and satiety, rapture and melancholy; and, turning in upon itself, now honestly confronts itself and now indulges in theatrical poses. With some modification, we may say of him, as he said of Burns: "What an antithetical mind! tenderness, roughness, delicacy, coarseness, sentiment, sensuality, soaring and grovelling, dirt and deity, all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay." It is this personality, coloring the scenes described, permeating the memories of great historic events, and expressing itself directly in reflective passages and lyrical outbursts, that engages our deepest interest in this "Pilgrimage," and indeed in virtually all of Byron's poetry.

The first two cantos contain the impressions made upon Byron in his tour through Portugal, Spain, Albania, and Greece. Although they established his fame (see the biography, above), they are far inferior, in brilliant creative energy, in vitalizing imagination, to the two later cantos.

CANTO THIRD

The allusion of the motto "In order that this employment will force you to think of something else; there is in truth no other remedy except this and time" is clear from lines 32-36.

(99.) 1-5. Is thy face like thy mother's: When Lady Byron left him, their daughter was but a few weeks old, and Byron never saw her again.

(102.) 158. "Pride of place is a term of falconry, meaning the highest pitch of flight. See Macbeth: 'An eagle towering in her pride of place . . .' (Byron's

note.)

(103.) 179-180. when the myrtle wreathes a sword etc. Two noble Athenians, Harmodius and Aristogiton, having hidden their daggers in branches of myrtle at the Festival of Athena, assassinated Hipparchus, brother of the tyrant Hippias, but failed to slay Hippias himself. After the expulsion of Hippias several years later, the two young conspirators, who had lost their lives in consequence of their deed, were extolled as types of the patriot and martyr. (104.) 226-234. And wild and high etc.:

"Cameron's Gathering" was the rallying song of the Scottish clan Cameron, played on the bagpipes. The chief of the clan was Donald Cameron of Lochiel, who had fought in "Albyn's hills" (Scotland) against "her Saxon foes" (the English) in 1745. Evan Cameron, grandfather of Donald, had fought against Cromwell. The valor of such ancestors was not forgotten on the field of Waterloo. (106.) 353. too far to show: so far that it was unwise to show.

(107.) 420. battles: battalions, armies. (108.) 450. that it should Lethe be: In the preceding lines, Byron, gazing upon the lovely Rhine, feels that it would be beautiful "like Heaven" if man could but leave it unsullied, as it had been created. Even now, he adds, it lacks nothing if he can but obliterate its conflicts, and his own, from his mind. But he cannot; he could not forget them unless it were not the Rhine but Lethe, the river of oblivion; cf. lines 458-459.

457. Glassed with its dancing light: The rays of the sun, reflected by the water as if by glass, conceal, rather than reveal, the blood of battles long ago.

(109.) 476. one fond breast: referring to his sister Augusta.

(111.) 601. Morat: scene of a Swiss victory in 1476.

604. Burgundy: Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy.

607. Unsepulchred they roamed: "The chapel is destroyed, and the pyramid. of bones diminished to a small number by the Burgundian legion in the service of France, who anxiously effaced this record of their ancestors' less successful invasions. . . (Byron's note.)

608. Canna's carnage: At Cannæ, in Italy, the Romans suffered a disastrous defeat by Hannibal in 216 B.C.

616. some Draconic clause: The code of laws said to have been drawn up by the Athenian Draco about 621 B.C. was stern and rigid.

625. Aventicum: "Aventicum, near Morat, was the Roman capital of Helvetia, where Avenches now stands" (Byron's note).

627. Julia, the daughter, the devoted: "Julia Alpinula, a young Aventian