James Hogg.

321 on, cannot be said with certainty. When we remember within how short a period the best poetry of Wordsworth and Southey was written, it would be unwise to determine too confidently that, had life been spared, his growth in the poetic art would have been continuous. Brief though his career was, it sufficed him to write poems which can only perish with the language. His passionate love of beauty, his strong and swift imagination, his luxurious flow of language, and his felicity of phrase, rank him among the great masters of English song. How powerful and wide-spread has been his influence is clearly proved by the many echoes of his verse which are found in succeeding writers.

We have now gone over the greatest names in the poetical literature of the nineteenth century. But a few writers have yet to be mentioned, one or two of whom were in their lifetime far more widely read than Wordsworth or Keats. Samuel Rogers (1763-1855) is remarkable as having, alone among the poets of his time, remained altogether untouched by the influence of the new era. He was a disciple of Pope, born out of due time, and sedulously followed the footsteps of his master. His poems, of which the principal are the "Pleasures of Memory" (1792), "Human Life" (1819), and "Italy" (1822), are now almost forgotten; they have not sufficient fire or strength to stand the ordeal of time. Their contemporary fame, which was considerable, owed a good deal to the social repute of their author, a rich banker, who was for many years a prominent figure in London society. Many amusing stories of his cynicism and biting and sarcastic remarks are on record, and tend to keep his memory alive. James Hogg (1770-1835), the "Ettrick Shepherd," was a genuine poet, with great but very ill-cultivated and undisciplined abilities. Much of his prose and a good deal of his poetry are worthless, but some of his songs, and the exquisite "Kilmeny," in the "Queen's Wake" (1813), reach a very high level of excellence. His rough and boisterous manners, and his unique and colossal self-conceit, rendered the "Shepherd " a favourite butt among the Edinburgh wits. Another Scots.

man, Thomas Campbell (1777-1844), like Rogers, began his poetic career with the publication of a didactic poem, the "Plea sures of Hope" (1799), which in a short time went through many editions. His next long poem, "Gertrude of Wyoming" (1809), breathed more of the modern spirit. Campbell's longer poems have now ceased to be much read or quoted, except in single lines; but his ringing war-ballads, such as the "Battle of the Baltic" and the "Mariners of England," are about the best things of the kind in the language, full of spirit and fire, and written in metre admirably adapted to the subject. Besides his poetry, Campbell wrote a good deal of prose, mostly done as hack-work, and of little permanent value. His "Specimens of the British Poets" is, however, a very good book; and if he had husbanded his energies better, he might have done excellent work as a prose writer, for his style is correct and elegant, and his literary judgments are in general accurate and judicious. Thomas Moore (1779-1852), whose "Life of Byron" (1830) is, considering all the many difficulties of the task, a very creditable performance, was one of the most popular poets of his time. An amiable, goodhearted, cheerful Irishman, possessed of many excellent qua lities, he was content to fritter away his life dangling on the skirts of the great, and was never so happy as when in titled company. His "Irish Melodies" are thin and artificial when compared with the songs of Burns, but they are light and graceful enough in their way, and well adapted to be linked to music. His most elaborate performance, "Lalla Rookh" (1817), an Eastern tale, is overloaded with gaudy ornament; but while containing little to satisfy the earnest student of poetry, is spirited and interesting. Some of his other writings show a marked talent for lively satire, which he was not slow to exercise against his political opponents.

SIR WALTER SCOTT, AND THE Prose LITERATURE OF THE EARLY PART OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

Sir Walter Scott; Mackintosh, Hallam, Alison; Jeffrey, Sydney Smith; Wilson, Lockhart, De Quincey; Lamb, Hazlitt, Hunt; Landor; Chalmers.

N our survey of the poets of the new era in the last chapter, one great name was omitted, the name of one who, till his less intense and dazzling light

paled before the brilliant and captivating radiance of Byron, was far and away the most popular poet of his time. It is scarcely necessary to say that we refer to Sir Walter Scott. But Scott's poetry, excellent though in some respects it be, is by no means his most enduring title to remembrance. If he had written nothing else, he would not now have ranked among the first writers of his time, far less would he have occupied among British authors a place in the opinion of many second only to that of Shakespeare. It is as the writer of a long series of fictions which, when we consider their excellence, their interest, their variety, their width of range, their accurate delineations of nature, of life, and of character, may be safely pronounced matchless, that Scott's name is, and in all probability will continue to be, cherished with fond and admiring reverence by millions of readers. But not only did Scott reign supreme as a novelist, and occupy an elevated position in the kindred realm of poetry; it may be said of him,

as of Goldsmith, that there was almost no kind of writing that he did not touch, and none which he touched that he did not adorn. The fertility, the affluence, the readiness of Scott's intellectual resources were indeed such that to contemplate them almost strikes one dumb with amazement. He was a manly and judicious critic, an accomplished antiquary, no contemptible historian, and a careful and painstaking editor. The amount of literary work of various kinds he managed to get through, while living, not the life of a recluse, but that of an active and bustling man of the world, attending carefully to his ordinary business, and always observant of the rites of hospitality, is something portentous and unexampled. To record with any fulness the life of a man of such various occupations and talents, of such boundless energy, would require a volume, not a few pages. Only the leading features, therefore, can be noted here.

Walter Scott was born at Edinburgh on August 15, 1771. His father was a "douce," careful, precise Writer to the Signet, whose chief features have been portrayed in indelible characters by his son in the portrait of Mr. Saunders Fairford in "Redgauntlet." Like many able men,-like, for example, his great contemporary, Goethe,-Scott owed the more rare and distinguished features of his intellectual character to his mother, a woman of taste and imagination. A lameness— never cured-in his infancy, and weak health, caused Scott in his third year to be sent to the house of his grandfather at Sandyknowe, near Kelso, in order to try the efficacy of country air and diet. The period of his residence there was a very happy one. He passed his days in the open fields, "with no other fellowship than that of the sheep and lambs ;" and in the long winter evenings his early passion for the romantic past was nurtured by the traditionary legends of Border heroism and adventure repeated by an aged female relative. In his eighth year he was sent to the High School of Edinburgh, of which the then headmaster was Dr. Adam, almost as celebrated a figure in Scottish educational history as Dr. Arnold of Rugby is in that of England. During his school career

Scott's Early Years.

325 he did not attend very sedulously to the ordinary studies there followed, but he read omnivorously, and delighted his com panions with frequent examples of his talent as a narrator of fictions, plentifully seasoned with the marvellous, and often relating to knight-errantry. "Slink over beside me, Jamie," he would whisper to his schoolfellow Ballantyne, afterwards, alas! inseparably connected with the darkest pages of his history, "and I'll tell you a story." When about thirteen, he first, during six months he passed with his aunt at Kelso, became acquainted with Percy's "Reliques." "I remember well," he says, "the spot where I read these volumes for the first time. It was beneath a huge plantanus tree, in the ruins of what had been intended for an old-fashioned arbour in the garden I have mentioned. The summer day sped onward so fast that, notwithstanding the sharp appetite of thirteen, I forgot the hour of dinner, was sought for with anxiety, and was still found entranced in my intellectual banquet." Truly the child is father of the man. From his earliest years Scott showed that love of old-world stories, of the days of chivalry and romance, and of all "auld nick-nackets" tending to make the past more real to him, which he afterwards displayed to its full extent in the gathering of ancient armour and miscellaneous articles of antiquity which he collected around him at Abbotsford, and which, more than anything else, was the source of his originality as a novelist and poet.

After leaving the High School, Scott entered the University of Edinburgh, where he studied in the same irregular and miscellaneous fashion as before and afterwards. Every great man is for the most part self-educated; what he acquires from schoolmasters and professors is trifling both in quantity and in value compared to what, following the bent of his genius, he acquires for himself. Scott was not a scholar; he was too careless of minute accuracy ever to trouble himself about those trifling facts and verbal subtleties a thorough acquaintance with which is the glory of University magnates. But he acquired in rough-and-ready fashion such a knowledge of various languages as to enable him to assimilate the litera