earn money by his pen. He received £1,000 from Constable for the copyright of an unwritten poem, Marmion, and mortgaged his time and genius to help a brother. Constable was then rather a dealer in rare old books than a publisher, but he foresaw Scott’s success, and outbid Messrs. Longman, if, indeed, they made any bid at all. To his brother Thomas he wrote a series of letters, still, I think, unpublished, and mainly noteworthy for the goodness of head, the wisdom, the benevolence and tact of the writer. By the end of 1807 he was finishing at once his Life of Dryden, and his Marmion; who, as he wrote to Lady Louisa Stuart in January 1808, is “gasping upon Flodden Field,” though Scott hoped, that day, “to knock him on the head with a few thumping stanzas.” When we remember that, by his brother’s failure, the whole affairs of the estates of the Marquis of Abercorn were thrown on his hands “in a state of unutterable confusion,” and at his own responsibility, we may estimate his industry. Describing the research needed by his Dryden he writes—
From my research the boldest spiders fled,
And moths retreating trembled as I read,
while at the same time he was leading Marmion from disgrace to death, and was passing the heart of the day in his official duties (1807). But by the end of February 1808, Marmion was in the hands of the public, equipped with the charming epistles to friends which precede the cantos.
Contrasting the over full life of Scott, and all his innumerable distractions, with the “day long blessed idleness” of Tennyson, we cannot expect from Marmion the delicate finish of The Idylls of the King. On the other hand, if Scott had enjoyed the leisure of Tennyson, his rhymed romances would not have been better or other than they are.
In the Introduction to Canto Third, written to Erskine, he tells us that criticism was wasted on him—
Then wild as cloud, or stream or gale,
Flow on, flow unconfined, my tale.
He will not imitate
those masters, o’er whose tomb
Immortal laurels ever bloom,
Instructive of the feeble bard
as the murmurs from the tomb may be. He will not even desert the fabled past to chant the glories of the “Red Cross Hero” (Sir Sidney Smith), nor of Sir Ralph Abercromby. But he foresees and predicts