d-Lothian," and David Gellatley's in
"Waverley"; besides the other scraps and snatches of minstrelsy too
numerous for mention, sown through the novels and longer poems. For in
spite of detraction, Walter Scott remains one of the foremost British
lyrists. In Mr. Palgrave's "Treasury" he is represented by a larger
number of selections than either Milton, Byron, Burns, Campbell, Keats,
or Herrick; making an easy fourth to Wordsworth, Shakspere, and Shelley.
And in marked contrast with Shelley especially, it is observable of
Scott's contributions to this anthology that they are not the utterance
of the poet's personal emotion; they are coronachs, pibrochs, gathering
songs, narrative ballads, and the like--objective, dramatic lyrics
touched always with the light of history or legend.

The step from ballad to ballad-epic is an easy one, and it was by a
natural evolution that the one passed into the other in Scott's hands.
"The Lay of the Last Minstrel" (1805) was begun as a ballad on the local
tradition of Gilpin Horner and at the request of the Countess of
Dalkeith, who told Scott the story. But his imagination was so full that
the poem soon overflowed its limits and expanded into a romance
illustrative of the ancient manners of the Border. The pranks of the
goblin page run in and out through the web of the tale, a slender and
somewhat inconsequential thread of _diablerie_. Byron had his laugh at
it in "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers";[30] and in a footnote on the
passage, he adds: "Never was any plan so incongruous and absurd as the
groundwork of this production." The criticism was not altogether
undeserved; for the "Lay" is a typical example of romantic, as
distinguished from classic, art both in its strength and in its weakness;
brilliant in passages, faulty in architechtonic, and uneven in execution.
Its supernatural machinery--Byron said that it had more "gramarye" than
grammar--is not impressive, if due exception be made of the opening of
Michael Scott's tomb in Canto Second.

When the "Minstrelsy" was published, it was remarked that it "contained
the elements of a hundred historical romances." It was from such
elements that Scott built up the structure of his poem about the nucleus
which the Countess of Dalkeith had given him. He was less concerned, as
he acknowledged, to tell a coherent story than to paint a picture of the
scenery and the old warlike life of the Border; that _tableau large de la
vie_ whi