In a life that was now very happy, whether spent in London, in Edinburgh, or in coursing and spearing salmon with the Ettrick Shepherd at Ashestiel, Scott occupied his morning hours with his edition of Swift, with the editing of the Somers Tracts, and with The Lady of the Lake, which appeared in May 1810.
The feud with Constable was now dying of natural decline, and Scott and Jeffrey were quite forgetting their differences. Scott had never concealed from Jeffrey his opinion that the critic knew nothing of the heart and glow of poetry, and Jeffrey, before publishing his review of The Lady of the Lake sent his proof sheets to Scott, expressing his regret for the “heedless asperities” in the criticism of Marmion. “Believe me when I say that I am sincerely proud both of your genius and your glory, and that I value your friendship more highly than most of either my literary or political opinions.” Jeffrey was a good fellow at heart, though, in criticising contemporary poetry, he spoke most highly of a certain Professor Brown! He found The Lady of the Lake “more polished in its diction” than its predecessors, and certainly its rhyming octosyllabic couplets are more monotonous than the varied cadences of the Lay. “It never expresses a sentiment which it can cost the most ordinary reader any exertion to comprehend,” which is true enough, but is no less true of the Iliad and the Odyssey. The general chorus of praise, and the rush of tourists to Loch Katrine and Ellen’s Isle, did not turn Scott’s head, or persuade him that he was a poet of the first order. Miss Scott told James Ballantyne that she had not read The Lady of the Lake. “Papa says there is nothing so bad for young people as reading bad poetry.” Yet he confessedly wrote for “young people of spirit.” He says, “I can, with honest truth, exculpate myself from having been at any time a partisan of my own poetry, even when it was in the highest fashion with the million.”
“LADY OF THE LAKE”
Meanwhile, whosoever, in youth, has read the magical lines—
The stag at eve had drunk his fill
Where danced the moon on Monan’s rill,
and has followed the chase across the Brig of Turk, to
The lone lake’s western boundary
has to thank Scott for leading him into the paradise of romance, and cares not how low the literary critics may rate the Minstrel. Such a reader has been with
mountains that like giants stand
To sentinel enchanted land.
Other enchanted lands there are, but to one Scott has given him the key, to a land where the second-sighted man foretells the coming of the stranger, and the prophet sleeps swathed in the black bull’s hide in the spray of the haunted linn.