the sword. After a mysterious voice
had pronounced his doom he was hurled out of the hall by a
whirlwind of irresistible fury. He told his story to the
shepherds, who found him dying on the cold hill side.

Regarding this legend as "an unhappy foundation for a prose
story," Scott did not complete his fragment, which in style and
treatment is not unlike the Gothic experiments of Mrs. Barbauld
and Dr. Nathan Drake. Such a story as that of the magic horn and
sword might have been told in the simple words that occur
naturally to a shepherd, "warmed to courage over his third
tumbler," like the old peasant to whom Stevenson entrusts the
terrible tale of _Thrawn Janet_, or to Wandering Willie, who
declared:

"I whiles mak a tale serve the turn among the country
bodies, and I have some fearsome anes, that mak the
auld carlines shake on the settle, and bits o' bairns
skirl on their minnies out frae their beds."

The personality of the narrator, swayed by the terror of his
tale, would have cast the spell that Scott's carefully framed
sentences fail to create. Another of Scott's _disjecta membra_,
composed at the end of the eighteenth century, is the opening of
a story called _The Lord of Ennerdale_, in which the family of
Ratcliffe settle down before the fire to listen to a story
"savouring not a little of the marvellous." As Lady Ratcliffe and
her daughters

"had heard every groan and lifted every trapdoor in
company with the noted heroine of Udolpho, had
valorously mounted _en croupe_ behind the horseman of
Prague through all his seven translators, had followed
the footsteps of Moor through the forests of Bohemia,"

and were even suspected of an acquaintance with Lewis's _Monk_,
Scott was setting himself no easy task when he undertook to
thrill these seasoned adventurers. After this prologue, which
leads one to expect a banquet of horrors, only a very brief
fragment of the story is forthcoming. Though he gently derides
Lady Ratcliffe's literary tastes, Scott, too, was an admirer of
Mrs. Radcliffe's novels, and had been so entranced by Burger's
_Lenore_ that he attempted an English version.[111] It was after
hearing Taylor's translation of this ballad read aloud that he
uttered his dismal ejaculation: "I wish to heaven I could get a
skull and two crossbones"--a whim that was speedily gratified.
He, too, like Lady Ratcliffe, had read _Die Raeuber_; and he
translated Goethe's