At
least if Milton's various interruptions of a much more ambitious
theme, to muse upon his own qualifications or disqualifications for
the task he had attempted, be not artistic mistakes--and I never heard
of any one who thought them so--I cannot see any reason why Scott's
periodic recurrence to his own personal history should be artistic
mistakes either. If Scott's reverie was less lofty than Milton's, so
also was his story. It seems to me as fitting to describe the relation
between the poet and his theme in the one case as in the other. What
can be more truly a part of _Marmion_, as a poem, though not as a
story, than that introduction to the first canto in which Scott
expresses his passionate sympathy with the high national feeling of
the moment, in his tribute to Pitt and Fox, and then reproaches
himself for attempting so great a subject and returns to what he calls
his "rude legend," the very essence of which was, however, a
passionate appeal to the spirit of national independence? What can be
more germane to the poem than the delineation of the strength the poet
had derived from musing in the bare and rugged solitudes of St.
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