ory as to the connection between ballads and
romances--His early fondness for romances--His acquaintance with
Romance languages--His work on the _Sir Tristrem_--Value of his
edition--Special quality of Scott's interest in the Middle
Ages--General theories expressed in the body of his work on
romances--His type of scholarship.

Ballads and romances are so closely related that Scott's early and
lasting interest in the one form naturally grew out of his interest in
the other. He held the theory that "the romantic ballads of later times
are for the most part abridgments of the ancient metrical romances,
narrated in a smoother stanza and more modern language."[72] It is not
surprising, then, that a considerable body of his critical work has to
do with the subject of mediaeval romance.

Throughout his boyhood Scott read all the fairy tales, eastern stories,
and romances of knight-errantry that fell in his way. When he was about
thirteen, he and a young friend used to spend hours reading together
such authors as Spenser, Ariosto, and Boiardo.[73] He remembered the
poems so well that weeks or months afterwards he could repeat whole
pages that had particularly impressed him. Somewhat later the two boys
improvised similar stories to recite to each other, Scott being the one
who proposed the plan and the more successful in carrying it out. With
this same friend he studied Italian and began to read the Italian poets
in the original. In his autobiography he says:[74] "I had previously
renewed and extended my knowledge of the French language, from the same
principle of romantic research. Tressan's romances, the Bibliotheque
Bleue, and Bibliotheque de Romans, were already familiar to me, and I
now acquired similar intimacy with the works of Dante, Boiardo, Pulci,
and other eminent Italian authors." Writing some years later he
remarked: "I was once the most enormous devourer of the Italian romantic
poetry, which indeed is the only poetry of their country which I ever
had much patience for; for after all that has been said of Petrarch and
his school, I am always tempted to exclaim like honest Christopher Sly,
'Marvellous good matter, would it were done.' But with Charlemagne and
his paladins I could dwell forever."[75] Scott learned languages easily,
and he read Spanish with about as much facility as Italian. Don Quixote
seems often to be the guide with whom he chooses to traverse the fields
of romance.[76] In Scott