ry of Inventions.
Hence the Prose Tales--Novels--and Romances--fresh floods of light
pouring all over Scotland--and occasionally illumining England, France,
and Germany, and even Palestine--whatever land had been ennobled by
Scottish enterprise, genius, valour, and virtue.

Up to the era of Sir Walter, living people had some vague, general,
indistinct notions about dead people mouldering away to nothing
centuries ago, in regular kirkyards and chance burial-places,
"'mang muirs and mosses many O," somewhere or other in that
difficultly-distinguished and very debatable district called the
Borders. All at once he touched their tombs with a divining-rod, and the
turf streamed out ghosts--some in woodmen's dresses--most in warrior's
mail: green archers leaped forth with yew-bow and quivers--and giants
stalked shaking spears. The grey chronicler smiled; and, taking up his
pen, wrote in lines of light the annals of the chivalrous and heroic
days of auld feudal Scotland. The nation then, for the first time, knew
the character of its ancestors; for those were not spectres--not they
indeed--nor phantoms of the brain--but gaunt flesh and blood, or glad
and glorious;--base-born cottage churls of the olden time, because
Scottish, became familiar to the love of the nation's heart, and so to
its pride did the high-born lineage of palace-kings. The worst of Sir
Walter is, that he has _harried_ all Scotland. Never was there such a
freebooter. He harries all men's cattle--kills themselves off-hand, and
makes bonfires of their castles. Thus has he disturbed and illuminated
all the land as with the blazes of a million beacons. Lakes lie with
their islands distinct by midnight as by mid-day; wide woods glow
gloriously in the gloom; and by the stormy splendour you even see ships,
with all sails set, far at sea. His favourite themes in prose or
numerous verse are still "Knights and Lords and mighty Earls," and their
Lady-loves, chiefly Scottish--of kings that fought for fame or
freedom--of fatal Flodden and bright Bannockburn--of the DELIVERER. If
that be not national to the teeth, Homer was no Ionian, Tyrtaeus not
sprung from Sparta, and Christopher North a Cockney. Let Abbotsford,
then, be cognomed by those that choose it, the Ariosto of the North--we
shall continue to call him plain Sir Walter.

Now, we beg leave to decline answering our own question--has he ever
written a Great Poem? We do not care one straw whether he has or not;
for h