Scott's is almost the only
poetry in the English language that not only runs thus in the head of
average men, but heats the head in which it runs by the mere force of its
hurried frankness of style, to use Scott's own terms, or by that of its
strong and pithy eloquence, as Campbell phrased it. And in _Cadyow Castle_
this style is at its culminating point.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 10: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, ii. 79.]
[Footnote 11: Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, viii. 370.]
CHAPTER V.
SCOTT'S MATURER POEMS.
Scott's genius flowered late. _Cadyow Castle_, the first of his poems,
I think, that has indisputable genius plainly stamped on its terse and
fiery lines, was composed in 1802, when he was already thirty-one
years of age. It was in the same year that he wrote the first canto of
his first great romance in verse, _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, a
poem which did not appear till 1805, when he was thirty-four. The
first canto (not including the framework, of which the aged harper is
the principal figure) was written in the lodgings to which he was
confined for a fortnight in 1802, by a kick received from a horse on
Portobello sands, during a charge of the Volunteer Cavalry in which
Scott was cornet.
Pages:
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76