Never can we forget the hurrying succession of pictures that pass by the bearer of the fiery cross, or the song of the distraught Blanche that gives warning to Fitz James.
The toils are pitch’d, and the stakes are set,
Ever sing merrily, merrily;
The bows they bend, and the knives they whet,
Hunters live so cheerily.
It was a stag, a stag of ten,
Bearing his branches sturdily;
He came stately down the glen,
Ever sing hardily, hardily.
It was there he met with a wounded doe,
She was bleeding deathfully;
She warned him of the toils below,
Oh, so faithfully, faithfully!
He had an eye and he could heed,
Ever sing warily, warily;
He had a foot, and he could speed,
Hunters watch so narrowly.
On this passage the egregious Jeffrey wrote—
“No machinery can be conceived more clumsy for effecting the deliverance of a distressed hero, than the introduction of a mad woman, who, without knowing or caring about the wanderer, warns him, by a song, to take care of the ambush that was set for him. The maniacs of poetry have indeed had a prescriptive right to be musical, since the days of Ophelia downwards; but it is rather a rash extension of this privilege to make them sing good sense, and to make sensible people be guided by them.”
“LADY OF THE LAKE”
Scott recked so lightly of this censure that he repeated the situation (his novels often repeat the situations of his poems), the warning lilts of a brainsick girl, in The Heart of Midlothian, in that most romantic passage where Madge Wildfire’s snatches of song give warning to the fugitive lover of Effie Deans. These parallelisms between the structure of the rhymed and of the anonymous prose romances are frequent and curious.
The whole poem of The Lady of the Lake is inimitably vivacious, it has on it the dew of morning in a mountain pass: the King is worthy of the praise of Scott’s princes given to Byron by the Prince of Wales, who, with all his faults, could appreciate Walter Scott and Jane Austen. “I told the Prince,” Byron wrote to Scott, “that I thought you more particularly the painter of Princes, as they never appeared more fascinating than in Marmion and The Lady of the Lake. He was pleased to coincide, and to dwell on the description of your James’s as no less royal than poetical. He spoke alternately of Homer and yourself, and seemed well acquainted with both.” A British king well acquainted with Homer is hardly the idiot of Thackeray’s satire.