These personified gentry I think are not in taste. Besides, Fear has been pallid any time these 2,000 years. It is mixing the style of Aeschylus and the Last Minstrel.
175. Bracy is a good rough vocative. No better suggests itself, unless Grim, Baron Grimm, or Grimoald, which is Saxon, or Grimbald! Tracy would obviate your objection [that the name Bracy occurs in Ivanhoe] but Bracy is stronger.
231. [The frown of night Conceals him, and bewrays their sight.]
Betrays. The other has an unlucky association.
243. [The glinting moon's half-shrouded ray.]
Why "glinting," Scotch, when "glancing" is English?
421. [Then solemnly the monk did say,
(The Abbot of Saint Mary's gray,)
The leman of a wanton youth
Perhaps may gain her father's ruth,
But never on his injured breast
May lie, caressing and caressed.
Bethink you of the vow you made
When your light daughter, all distraught,
From yonder slaughter-plain was brought,
That if in some secluded cell
She might till death securely dwell,
The house of God should share her wealth.]
Holy abbots surely never so undisguisedly blurted out their secular aims.
I think there is so much of this kind of poetry, that it would not be very taking, but it is well worthy of pleasing a private circle. One blemish runs thro', the perpetual accompaniment of natural images. Seasons of the year, times of day, phases of the moon, phenomena of flowers, are quite as much your dramatis personae as the warriors and the ladies. This last part is as good as what precedes.