to dine off slaughtered authors
as the Giant in "Jack and the Beanstalk" dined off young Englishmen,
keyed his voice to unwonted praise. The influx of tourists into the
Trossachs, where the scene of the poem was laid, was so great as
seriously to embarrass the mail coaches, until at last the posting
charges had to be raised in order to diminish the traffic. Far away in
Spain, at a trying moment of the Peninsular campaign, Sir Adam Ferguson,
posted on a point of ground exposed to the enemy's fire, read to his men
as they lay prostrate on the ground the passage from _The Lady of the
Lake_ describing the combat between Roderick Dhu's Highlanders and the
forces of the Earl of Mar; and "the listening soldiers only interrupted
him by a joyous huzza when the French shot struck the bank close above
them." Such tributes--and they were legion--to the power of his poetry
to move adventurous and hardy men, must have been intoxicating to
Scott; there is small wonder that the success of his poems gave him, as
he says, "such a _heeze_ as almost lifted him off his feet."

III

Scott's modesty was not in danger, but so far as his prudence was
concerned, his success did really lift him off his feet. In 1812, still
more encouraged thereto by entering upon the emoluments of the office of
Clerk of Sessions, the duties of which he had performed for six years
without pay, he purchased Abbotsford, an estate on the Tweed, adjoining
that of the Duke of Buccleugh, his kinsman, and near the beautiful ruins
of Melrose Abbey. Here he began to carry out the dream of his life, to
found a territorial family which should augment the power and fame of
his clan. Beginning with a modest farm house and a farm of a hundred
acres, he gradually bought, planted, and built, until the farm became a
manorial domain and the farm house a castle. He had not gone far in this
work before he began to realize that the returns from his poetry would
never suffice to meet such demands as would thus be made upon his purse.
Byron's star was in the ascendant, and before its baleful magnificence
Scott's milder and more genial light visibly paled. He was himself the
first to declare, with characteristic generosity, that the younger poet
had "bet"[3] him at his own craft. As Carlyle says, "he had held the
sovereignty for some half-score of years, a comparatively long lease of
it, and now the time seemed come for dethronement, for abdication. An
unpleasant business; which, howe