the _Minstrelsy_ itself was the
editor's appearance as a prose-writer. Percy had started, and others
down to Ritson had continued, the practice of interspersing verse
collections with dissertations in prose; and while the first volume of
the _Minstrelsy_ contained a long general introduction of more than a
hundred pages, and most of the ballads had separate prefaces of more or
less length, the preface to 'Young Tamlane' turned itself into a
disquisition on fairy lore, which, being printed in small type, is
probably not much shorter than the general introduction. In these pieces
(the Fairy essay is said to be based on information partly furnished by
Leyden) all the well-known characteristics of Scott's prose style
appear--its occasional incorrectness, from the strictly scholastic point
of view, as well as its far more than counterbalancing merits of vivid
presentation, of arrangement, not orderly in appearance but curiously
effective in result, of multifarious facts and reading, of the bold
pictorial vigour of its narrative, of its pleasant humour, and its
incessant variety.

Nor was this the only opportunity for exercising himself in the medium
which, even more than verse, was to be his, that the earliest years of
the century afforded to Scott. The _Edinburgh Review_, as everybody
knows, was started in 1802. Although its politics were not Scott's,
they were for some years much less violently put forward and exclusively
enforced than was the case later; indeed, the Whig Review started with
much the same ostensible policy as the Whig Deliverer a century before,
the policy, at least in declared intention, of using both parties as far
as might be for the public good. The attempt, if made _bona fide_, was
not more successful in one case than in the other; but it at least
permitted Tories to enlist under the blue-and-yellow banner. The
standard-bearer, Jeffrey, moreover, was a very old, an intimate, and a
never-quite-to-be-divorced friend of Scott's. At a later period, Scott's
contributions to periodicals attained an excellence which has been
obscured by the fame of the poems and novels together, even more
unjustly than the poems have been obscured by the novels alone. His
reviews at this time on Southey's _Amadis_, on Godwin's _Chaucer_, on
Ellis's _Specimens_, etc., are a little crude and amateurish, especially
in the direction (well known, to those who have ever had to do with
editing, as a besetting sin of novices) of su