it our duty to point out to the
notice of the author. But after all it is the spirit of a poet that we
consider as demanding our chief attention; and upon its ardour or
rapidity must finally hinge our applause or condemnation."[362]

Scott's opinions about meters reflect the same taste. He persuaded
himself, when he was writing _The Lady of the Lake_, that the
eight-syllable line is "more congenial to the English language--more
favourable to narrative poetry at least--than that which has been
commonly termed heroic verse,"[363] and he proceeded to show that the
first half-dozen lines of Pope's _Iliad_ were each "bolstered out" with
a superfluous adjective. "The case is different in descriptive poetry,"
he added, "because there epithets, if they are happily selected, are
rather to be sought after than avoided.... But if in narrative you are
frequently compelled to tag your substantives with adjectives, it must
frequently happen that you are forced upon those that are merely
commonplaces." He mentions other beauties of his favorite verse,--the
opportunities for variation by double rhyme and by occasionally dropping
a syllable, and the correspondence between the length of line and our
natural intervals between punctuation,--but gives as his final excuse
for using it his "better knack at this 'false gallop' of verse." The
argument is ingenious enough, but his analysis of heroic verse has only
a limited application, and his last reason probably was, as he was
candid enough to admit, the most weighty. George Ellis replied to his
defence thus: "I don't think, after all the eloquence with which you
plead for your favourite metre, that you really like it from any other
motive than that _sainte paresse_--that delightful indolence--which
induces one to delight in those things which we can do with the least
fatigue."[364] This seems hardly a fair return for the poet's appeal to
Ellis in one of the epistles of _Marmion_:[365]

"Come listen! bold in thy applause,
The bard shall scorn pedantic laws."

Another introduction in the same poem is given up to a justification of
the author's "unconfined" style, on the score of his love for the wild
songs of his own country and the freedom of his early training.[366]

Scott practically never rewrote his prose, and the result gave Hazlitt
opportunity to say:[367] "We should think the writer could not possibly
read the manuscript after he has once written it, or overlook the
press."