sible that after this severe exercise he let it take
care of itself to some extent later. His introduction is in the strict
octosyllable, with only such licences of slur or elision--

'The pi | _tying Duch_ | ess praised its chime,'
'_He had played_ | it to King Charles the Good'--

as the greatest precisians might have allowed themselves. But the First
Canto breaks at once into the full licence, not merely of
equivalence,--that is to say, of substituting an anapaest or a trochee
for an iamb,--but of shifting the base and rhythm of any particular
verse, or of set batches of verses, between the three ground-feet, and,
further, of occasionally introducing sixes, as in the ballad metre, and
even fours--

'Bards long | shall tell
How Lord Wal | ter fell,'

instead of the usual eights.

In similar fashion he varies the rhymes, passing as the subject or the
accompaniment of the word-music may require, from the couplet to the
quatrain, and from the quatrain to the irregularly rhymed 'Pindaric';
always, however, taking care that, except in the set lyric, the quatrain
shall not fall too much into definite stanza, but be interlaced in sense
or sound sufficiently to carry on the narrative. The result, to some
tastes, is a medium quite unsurpassed for the particular purpose. The
only objection to it at all capable of being maintained, that I can
think of, is that the total effect is rather lyrical than epic. And so
much of this must be perhaps allowed as comes to granting that Scott's
verse-romance is rather a long and cunningly sustained and varied ballad
than an epic proper.

The _Lay_, though not received with quite that eager appetite for poetry
which Scott was 'born to introduce,' and of which he lived long enough
to see the glutting, had a large and immediate sale. The author, not yet
aware what a gold mine his copyrights were, parted with this after the
first edition, and received in all rather less than L770, a sum trifling
in comparison with his after gains; but probably the largest that had as
yet been received by any English poet for a single volume not published
by subscription. It is curious that, at the estimated rate of three for
one in comparing the value of money at the end of the seventeenth and
the beginning of the nineteenth century, the sum almost exactly equals
that paid by Tonson for Dryden's _Fables_, the last book, before the
_Lay_ itself, which had united popularity, merit, and bulk