of scope. Yet Scott's vivid sense of the
past had its bounds, as Professor Masson pointed out.[3] It was the
"Gothic" past that he venerated. The field of his studies,
chronologically considered, included the period between his own time and
the crusades; and geographically, was in general confined to England and
Scotland, with comparatively rare excursions abroad. When, in his
novels, he carried his Scottish or English heroes out of Britain into
foreign countries, he was apt to bestow upon them not only a special
endowment of British feeling, but also a portion of that interest in
their native literature which marked the taste of their creator. We find
that the personages in his books are often distinguished by that love of
stirring poetry, particularly of popular and national poetry, which was
a dominant trait in Scott's whole literary career.

With Scotland and with popular poetry any discussion of Sir Walter
properly begins. The love of Scottish minstrelsy first awakened his
literary sense, and the stimulus supplied by ballads and romances never
lost its force. We may say that the little volumes of ballad chap-books
which he collected and bound up before he was a dozen years old
suggested the future editor, as the long poem on the Conquest of
Grenada, which he is said to have written and burned when he was
fifteen, foreshadowed the poet and romancer.

Yet Scott's career as an author began rather late. He published a few
translations when he was twenty-five years old, but his first notable
work, the _Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border_, did not appear until
1802-3, when he was over thirty. This book, the outgrowth of his early
interest in ballads and his own attempts at versifying, exhibited both
his editorial and his creative powers. It led up to the publication of
two important volumes which contained material originally intended to
form part of the _Minstrelsy_, but which outgrew that work. These were
the edition of the old metrical romance _Sir Tristrem_, which showed
Scott as a scholar, and the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_, the first of
Scott's own metrical romances. So far his literary achievement was all
of one kind, or of two or three kinds closely related. In this first
period of his literary life, perhaps even more than later, his editorial
impulse, his scholarly activity, was closely connected with the
inspiration for original writing. The _Lay of the Last Minstrel_ was the
climax of this series of enterprise