and the glow of its scenic colouring. No poet ever
equalled Scott in the description of wild and simple scenes and the
expression of wild and simple feelings. But I have said enough now of
his poetry, in which, good as it is, Scott's genius did not reach its
highest point. The hurried tramp of his somewhat monotonous metre, is
apt to weary the ears of men who do not find their sufficient
happiness, as he did, in dreaming of the wild and daring enterprises
of his loved Border-land. The very quality in his verse which makes it
seize so powerfully on the imaginations of plain, bold, adventurous
men, often makes it hammer fatiguingly against the brain of those who
need the relief of a wider horizon and a richer world.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 12: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ii. 217.]

[Footnote 13: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ii. 226.]

[Footnote 14: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, v. 248.]

[Footnote 15: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, v. 338.]

[Footnote 16: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ii. 137.]

[Footnote 17: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ii. 259.]

[Footnote 18: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, iii. 327.]

CHAPTER VI.

COMPANIONS AND FRIENDS.

I have anticipated in some degree, in speaking of Scott's later
poetical works, what, in point of time at least, should follow some
slight sketch of his chosen companions, and of his occupations in the
first period of his married life. Scott's most intimate friend for
some time after he went to college, probably the one who most
stimulated his imagination in his youth, and certainly one of his most
intimate friends to the very last, was William Clerk, who was called
to the bar on the same day as Scott. He was the son of John Clerk of
Eldin, the author of a book of some celebrity in its time on _Naval
Tactics_. Even in the earliest days of this intimacy, the lads who had
been Scott's fellow-apprentices in his father's office, saw with some
jealousy his growing friendship with William Clerk, and remonstrated
with Scott on the decline of his regard for them, but only succeeded
in eliciting from him one of those outbursts of peremptory frankness
which anything that he regarded as an attempt to encroach on his own
interior liberty of choice always provoked. "I will never cut any
man," he said, "unless I detect him in scoundrelism, but I know not
what right any of you have to interfere with my choice of my company.
As it is, I fairly own that though I like many of you very much, an