ilk with a careless, delicate hand, and have the softness
of flowers. The poet's figures might be compared to old [C] tapestries
copied on the finest velvet:--they are not like Raphael's _Cartoons_,
but they are very like Mr. Westall's drawings, which accompany, and are
intended to illustrate them. This facility and grace of execution is the
more remarkable, as a story goes that not long before the appearance of
the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_ Sir Walter (then Mr.) Scott, having, in
the company of a friend, to cross the Frith of Forth in a ferry-boat,
they proposed to beguile the time by writing a number of verses on a
given subject, and that at the end of an hour's hard study, they found
they had produced only six lines between them. "It is plain," said the
unconscious author to his fellow-labourer, "that you and I need never
think of getting our living by writing poetry!" In a year or so after
this, he set to work, and poured out quarto upon quarto, as if they had
been drops of water. As to the rest, and compared with true and great
poets, our Scottish Minstrel is but "a metre ballad-monger." We would
rather have written one song of Burns, or a single passage in Lord
Byron's _Heaven and Earth_, or one of Wordsworth's "fancies and
good-nights," than all his epics. What is he to Spenser, over whose
immortal, ever-amiable verse beauty hovers and trembles, and who has
shed the purple light of Fancy, from his ambrosial wings, over all
nature? What is there of the might of Milton, whose head is canopied in
the blue serene, and who takes us to sit with him there? What is there
(in his ambling rhymes) of the deep pathos of Chaucer? Or of the
o'er-informing power of Shakespear, whose eye, watching alike the
minutest traces of characters and the strongest movements of passion,
"glances from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven," and with the
lambent flame of genius, playing round each object, lights up the
universe in a robe of its own radiance? Sir Walter has no voluntary
power of combination: all his associations (as we said before) are those
of habit or of tradition. He is a mere narrative and descriptive poet,
garrulous of the old time. The definition of his poetry is a pleasing
superficiality.

Not so of his NOVELS AND ROMANCES. There we turn over a new
leaf--another and the same--the same in matter, but in form, in power
how different! The author of Waverley has got rid of the tagging of
rhymes, the eking out of syllables