placency and enthusiasm our Chief walked about in a heavy rain, examining, dwelling upon every trace of this celebrated and unhappy woman. She had been educated at his country seat, and one of the avenues of his magnificent park yet bears her name. On her, fell a double portion of the miseries of her fated family. She had the beauty and the wit, the gay spirits, the elegant tastes, the kindly disposition of her grandmother, Mary of Scotland. Her very virtues, as a wife and a woman, not less than her pride and feminine prejudices, ruined herself, her husband, and her people. When Frederic hesitated to accept the crown of Bohemia, his high-spirited wife exclaimed, 'Let me rather eat dry bread at a king's table than feast at the board of an elector;' and it seemed as if some avenging demon hovered in the air, to take her literally at her word, for she and her family lived to eat dry bread; ay, and to beg it before they ate it; but she would be a queen. Blest as she was in love, in all good gifts of nature and fortune, in all means of happiness, a kingly crown was wanting to complete her felicity; and it was cemented to her brow with the blood of two millions of men. And who was to blame? Was not her mode of thinking the fashion of her time, the effect of her education? Who had

Put in her tender heart the aspiring flame

Of golden sovereignty?

THE poetry of Scott has been eclipsed by his prose. He had the singular fortune to see his poetic fame diminished by a cause which carried with it its own consolation, the vast success of those prose romances which came after his metrical ones,-prose in outward form, but abounding in all the elements of poetry, in such force and extent as gave him no mean claim to the title of the second Shakspeare. 'Twas a proud circumstance, and one which can happen rarely in the

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history of literature, that the gloom cast upon his poetry, after it had placed him by acclamation in the chair of cotemporary supremacy, was the mighty shadow of his own growing form, as he ascended higher and still higher up the mountain of Fame, and towards the sun of universal favour. There was indeed another cause which operated collaterally to put down his romantic lays below their just position, and that was the novelty, and consequent great popularity of Byron's Eastern Tales. This cause could, however, have produced merely a temporary effect; for the exaggerated and unhealthy spirit of the Giaour and Mazeppa school could not long maintain its hold upon the public mind. The very effect of Byron's other productions tended to destroy their influence; for it was impossible for the same mind to feel the philosophic depth and spiritual beauty of Childe Harold, or of Cain, or to enjoy the wit, the humour, the sarcasm, the graphic painting of human life, the alternating mockery and poetic feeling which characterize the equally wonderful and reprehensible Don Juan, and still to admire the stilted and hectoring style of those Turkish tales. Byron was himself the first to laugh at the public which had swallowed his mock-heroic for the true sublime. Between the other poetry of Byron and that of Scott there could be no direct comparison, and therefore no unjust disparagement; for, though no one would contest the question of Byron's superiority, as a poet, to Scott, no intellect which could feel the greatness of the one could be insensible to the real merit of the other in any of his productions. It could only be the

fascination of the prose romances of Scott which could draw away the public from his poetical ones, and make it for a time unjust in its estimate of them; for, after all, in their particular class and department, they are amongst the most delightful poems in the language. They are not poetry of the grade of Shakspeare's Hamlet or Lear, of Milton's Paradise Lost, or some of the writings of Wordsworth or Coleridge; they do not fix us in deep astonishment as does the stern majesty of some of these, nor lead us down into the deepest regions of the human heart as do the others; yet they are, in their way and of their kind, as real poetry. They are transcripts of nature in her most beautiful scenery, of human life in its most picturesque and romantic shape. Who would wish for ever to be borne along by the city crowd, to live amid the fiercest political agitations, within the sound of the most trenchant or patriotic eloquence, whether of senate or of bar, and would not delight to steal away to the domestic fireside-to home peace and affection, to the voices of children, wives, sisters, and friends? There are none but feel the delicious charm of such retreat from the excitement and exasperation of those public stimulants, and none therefore but who must love the poetry of Scott. The epistles prefatory to each canto of Marmion are some of the most interesting peeps into a heart, strong in its tastes and warm in its affections, with which the world was ever favoured. It is an old truth, that we may have too much of a good thing; and to climb Alps, however magnificent,-to wander amid the stunning roar of an ocean, however sublime,

to run bareheaded through tempests and darkness, however exciting, can be only the wild delights of a moment,—acts of youth, of passion, or romance; but, to stroll out for a summer evening, amongst beautiful hills, by streams rapid and clear; through forests hoary with years, yet green and musical with spring; these are refreshments which every day and every stage of life have enough in them of weariness and annoyance to render most welcome, and all who love them must love the poetry of Scott. He himself knew, as well as any man, the genuine character and claims of his poetry. He took down from the crumbling wall of the feudal castle, the disused harp of the old metrical romancer, and strung it again to feudal strains in the improved harmony of modern language, and with the wider views of modern society. If the field was old, the mode of its occupation was new: he engrafted on the old Anglo-Norman stock, a germ of poetry novel and peculiar. Chivalrous life, as seen not from its own living centre, but from the modern distance, was beheld again with a quick delight which proved the original power and fresh feeling of its restorer. And had it no high and heroic excitement? The life and character of the Gael and the Borderer, till then nearly overlooked; the adventures of Bruce, Wallace, and the fourth and fifth James; the contentions of England and Scotland; the beauty of the highland hills and lochs, and the stern picturesqueness of many a mouldering castle, both in highland and lowland,all had a newness, a piquancy, and a spirit in them, that was felt throughout the kingdom. It is true that, as to heroic story