e place was not far
from Selkirk, on the banks of the Tweed and in the centre of the
Buccleuch country. He seems to have settled there by the end of July
1804. The family, after leaving it for the late autumn session in
Edinburgh, returned at Christmas, by which time _The Lay of the Last
Minstrel_, though not actually published, was printed and ready. It was
issued in the first week of the new year 1805, being, except
Wordsworth's and Coleridge's, the first book published, which was
distinctly and originally characteristic of the new poetry of the
nineteenth century.

FOOTNOTES:

[7] Not many years before, Johnson had denied that it was possible for a
working man of letters to earn even _six_ guineas a sheet (the
_Edinburgh_ began at ten and proceeded to a minimum of sixteen),
'_communibus sheetibus_,' as he put it jocularly to Boswell. Southey, in
the year of Scott's marriage, seems to have thought about ten shillings
(certainly not more) 'not amiss' for a morning's work in reviewing.

[8] For an interesting passage showing how slow contemporary ears were
to admit this, see Southey's excellent defence of his own practice to
Wynn (_Letters_, i. 69).

[9] His attempts at the kind may best be despatched in a note here.
Their want of merit contrasts strangely with the admirable quality of
the 'Old Play' fragments scattered about the novels. _Halidon Hill_
(1822), in the subject of which Scott had an ancestral interest from his
Swinton blood, reminds one much more of Joanna Baillie than of its
author. _Macduff's Cross_ (1823), a very brief thing, is still more like
Joanna, was dedicated to her, and appeared in a miscellany which she
edited for a charitable purpose. _The Doom of Devorgoil_, written for
Terry in the first 'cramp' attack of 1817, but not published till 1830,
has a fine supernatural subject, but hardly any other merit.
_Auchindrane_, the last, is by far the best.

[10] It is quite possible that Mrs. Brown's illiterate authority, or one
of his predecessors in title, took 'fee' in the _third_ sense of
'cattle.'

[11] He wrote for his corps the 'War Song of the Edinburgh Light
Dragoons,' which appeared in the _Scots Magazine_ for 1802, but was
written earlier. It is good, but not so good as it would have been a few
years later.

CHAPTER III

THE VERSE ROMANCES

Although Scott was hard upon his thirty-fifth year when the _Lay_
appeared, and although he had already a considerable literary reputa