ness. Mr. Stoddart recovered the sheets of his
poem, and his cook gradually, and perhaps not injudiciously, expended
them for domestic purposes.

Apart from its rarity, _The Death-Wake_ has an interest of its own for
curious amateurs of poetry. The year of its composition (1830) was the
great year of _Romanticisme_ in France, the year of _Hernani_, and of
Gautier's _gilet rouge_. In France it was a literary age given to
mediaeval extravagance, to the dagger and the bowl, the cloak and
sword, the mad monk and the were-wolf; the age of Petrus Borel and
MacKeat, as well as of Dumas and Hugo. Now the official poetry of our
country was untouched by and ignorant of the virtues and excesses of
1830. Wordsworth's bolt was practically shot; Sir Walter was ending
his glorious career; Shelley and Byron and Keats were dead, and the
_annus mirabilis_ of Coleridge was long gone by. Three young poets of
the English-speaking race were producing their volumes, destined at
first to temporary neglect. The year 1830 was the year of Mr.
Tennyson's _Poems, chiefly Lyrical_, his first book, not counting
_Poems by Two Brothers_. It was also the year of Mr. Browning's
_Pauline_ (rarer even than _The Death-Wake_); and it was the year
which followed the second, and perhaps the most characteristic,
poetical venture of Edgar Allan Poe. In Mr. Tennyson's early lyrics,
and in Mr. Poe's, any capable judge must have recognised new notes of
romance. Their accents are fresh and strange, their imaginations dwell
in untrodden regions. Untouched by the French romantic poets, they yet
unconsciously reply to their notes, as if some influence in the mental
air were at work on both sides of the Channel, on both sides of the
Atlantic. Now, in my opinion, this indefinite influence was also
making itself felt, faintly and dimly, in Scotland. _The Death-Wake_
is the work of a lad who certainly had read Keats, Coleridge and
Shelley, but who is no imitator of these great poets. He has, in a few
passages, and at his best, an accent original, distinct, strangely
musical, and really replete with promise. He has a fresh unborrowed
melody and mastery of words, the first indispensable sign of a true
poet. His rhymed heroic verse is no more the rhymed heroic verse of
_Endymion_, than it is that of Mr. Pope, or of Mr. William Morris. He
is a new master of the old instrument.

His mood is that of Scott when Scott was young, and was so anxious to
possess a death's head and c